
Book »W £ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 



£&%& 



LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 



BY 

HENRY WALLACE 



THIRD EDITION 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1900 

All rights reserved 



CM 



TWO Copies RJECEIVBIO, 

tlbrary of Congre«% 
Office of tut 

AM S- 1900 

Bsglittr of Copyright* 
SECOND COPY, 

griSl! 

64127 



^ 



COPYKIGHT, 1897, 

By THE WALLACE PUBLISHING COMPANY 

Copyright, 1900, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

Twestty years hence the farm boy of to-day 
will mainly control the business of the state 
and nation, as it is now controlled by the farm 
boy of twenty-five years ago. To aid in start- 
ing this farm boy on the right track and to 
make his pathway plainer and easier, is the 
object of this publication in its present form. 
I know how the farm boy feels; for I have 
experienced his isolation, his fears, his hopes, 
his ambitions, his lack of experience and knowl- 
edge of the world, and hence I know his need 
of a kindly, sympathetic friend, outside of the 
family, who will suggest rather than advise, 
guide rather than lead, w^ho would rather com- 
mend than censure, and who remains a boy in 
feeling though a man in years and experience. 

Nothing was further from the writer's thought, 
at the beginning of these letters, than to write 
a book. The first letter was merely an effort 



VI PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

to make matters smoother between a certain 
father and his son. The rest followed, I 
scarcely know how. The book wrote itself ; 
like Topsy, "it growed." The marked favor 
with which the letters as first published in 
Wallaces' Farmer have been received, and 
the desire expressed on every hand to have 
them in permanent form, leads me to hope that 
it will do its part in fitting the farm boy for 
his high destiny. With his robust health, his 
independent spirit, his native courage, his train- 
ing in the primary virtues of industry, economy, 
and uprightness, and his opportunities for clear 
thinking, the farm boy may and will be the 
ruling power in this nation if he is rightly 
guided. To do his part in guiding him aright 
is the desire and ambition of 

HENRY WALLACE, 

Editor Wallaces' Farmer. 
Des Moines, Iowa, 
September, 1897. 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 

While the following letters were written 
especially for the farm boy, the record of the 
sale of the two previous editions proves most 
conclusively that the farm boy's father is as 
much interested in them as the farm boy him- 
self. Nor should this be a matter of surprise, 
for in reading them he lives over again what is 
ordinarily the happiest portion of his life. 

It was at first a great surprise to me that the 
city boy and his father should read these letters 
as eagerly as do their country cousins. The 
obvious explanation is that the city boy sees 
in them glimpses of a life among the green 
fields and flowing brooks — filled with conven- 
ient swimming holes — for which his soul natu- 
rally longs ; while to the city boy's father they 
reveal glimpses of past experience, or of what 
he has long regarded as an ideal human life. 

THE AUTHOR. 
Des Moines, Iowa, 
March 1, 1900. 

vii 



CONTENTS 



I. The Farm Boy and his Father 

II. The Farm Boy and his Mother 

III. The Farm Boy and his Temper 

IV. The Farm Boy and his Chum . 
V. The Farm Boy and his Reading 

VI. The Farm Boy and his Future Business 

VII. The Farm Boy and his Fun 

VIII. The Farm Boy and his Education . 

IX. The Farm Boy and his Start in Life 

X. The Farm Boy and his Habits 

XI. The Farm Boy from Home 

XII. About the Hardup Family 

XIII. About the Richman Family 

XIV. The Hardman Family 
XV. Commercial Morality 

XVI. The Brodhead Family 

XVII. Types of Common People 

XVIII. The Good Man . 



1 

8 

14 

23 

31 

38 

45 

52 

61 

71 

82 

91 

100 

112 

125 

140 

154 

168 



LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

CHAPTER I 

the farm boy and his father 

My dear Boy : 

It has occurred to me that matters might 
not be going quite right between you and 
your father, and that a word from one who 
has been both a farm boy and a father of farm 
boys might be helpful to both. I do not think 
for a moment that there is anything seriously 
wrong, but I fear that neither of you is as 
happy in your relations with each other as he 
ought to be and can be. I take it for granted 
that you love and respect your father ; not 
quite in the same way that you love your 
mother, because the affection that you bear 
to the one is distinctly different from that 
which you bear to the other. In the very 
nature of things it must be. I assume that 
you have a good father who loves you dearly 



2 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

and who above all things else desires that you 
be a strong, true, brave, noble man, who will 
wear his name with honor when all of him that 
is mortal is lying in the grave. I know he 
thinks more of you than he does of the farm 
and all that is on it, saving always your mother 
and your brothers and sisters. I assume, also, 
that you are a good boy, and therefore there 
is no reason why you and your father should 
not be as happy together as people can be in 
this world. If you are not, it is likely that 
both of you are somewhat to blame, and I 
will venture a guess as to why you are not 
as happy as I would like to see you. 

You, perhaps, think your father is need- 
lessly exacting in some things. He wants the 
stable cleaned out promptly and thoroughly, 
and the pigs fed just so every time, whether 
it be wet or dry, or whether it be a good day 
to go fishing or a bad one. He wants the 
cows milked clean, does not want any loud 
talking while milking, and he wants the milk 
cared for in his own way. If you fail in any 
of those things, he does not like it, and you 
do not see why he should be so very particu- 
lar. I will tell you why. Your father was 
probably a little bit careless himself when a 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FATHER 6 

boy ; he now sees his mistake ; he knows how 
difficult it was for him to get over this bad 
habit, and he does not want you to have the 
same kind of trouble. 

You do not see why he disapproves of your 
going out with a lot of other boys whom you 
regard as " good fellows," but who have some 
bad habits, such, for example, as using profane 
language or indulging in obscene talk. I will 
tell you why he does not want you to go with 
those boys. He possibly went more or less 
with that class of boys himself, and knows 
from experience that they are not the kind 
of boys with whom you ought to associate. 

He objects to your going out at night, un- 
less it be to some " literary," or to enjoy a social 
visit with a neighbor. I am sure he is per- 
fectly right about this because he has had 
experience and you have not. You do not 
see why he insists on your going to church 
every Sabbath and staying for Sabbath-school, 
even if you are tired and sleepy and would 
like a good long day's rest. Again, I tell you 
why. He felt, when he was a boy, just as 
you do, but years have taught him the necessity 
of acquiring steady and regular habits of in- 
dustry, morality, and religion. Your father 



4 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

has lived a long time, has had lots of experience 
and knows a great deal that books cannot teach, 
and he would like, above all things else, to be 
able to impart that experience to you, which he 
knows that he cannot impart except by insist- 
ing on your acquiring it by the doing of it. 
That is the only way that anything worth learn- 
ing can be learned. In all these things your 
father is exactly right. 

You perhaps feel that he ought to give you a 
chance to earn something for yourself ; that 
there ought to be something on the farm which 
is your very own, or, as your sister might say, 
your "ownest own." Well, I think so, too. I 
think you are entirely right in this, and if I 
were in your place I should, some day after sup- 
per, when he was not troubled by anything, talk 
the matter over with him in a manly, open way. 
Nothing pleases a father so much as to see his 
boy develop manliness. I should, if I were you, 
talk to him about this, but I should make a 
square bargain that if I were to have a pig, or a 
calf, or a colt on the terms agreed upon, it must 
be my hog, or my steer, or my horse when it is 
disposed of, and I am to be the sole judge, after 
asking his advice, as to how I am to use that 
money. 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FATHER 5 

You think your father should not bind you 
down so closely as to the plan you are to take 
in doing certain things about the farm. You 
wish to exercise your own judgment, and have, 
so to speak, a little leeway. You are willing to 
do the things he wants you to do, but you 
would like to do a little planning and thinking 
for yourself as to the way of doing them. Here 
you may be right and again you may be wrong ; 
but I think he had better say to you, " My son, 
there are certain results that I wish accom- 
plished : I think you had better do the work 
this way, but if you see a better way, you may 
try your hand." You will probably find that his 
way is the right way after all, but it will do no 
harm to find that out by experience. 

You may think your father is something of 
an old fogy in some matters connected with his 
farming. There is a possibility that he is, and 
again there is a possibility that his long years of 
experience have enabled him to see through the 
fallacy of a lot of theories that you may not be 
able to see through as yet. Therefore, I would 
advise you before condemning his ideas, to study 
them quite thoroughly and weigh carefully what 
you may read or hear on the other side. He 
may not be able to give you as good reasons as 



b LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

you may see on the other side, on paper, but I 
suspect that he has the common sense of it 
pretty firmly fixed under his gray hairs, and 
therefore may not have the patience to sit down 
and argue the thing out with you. 

I should like you to have a profound respect 
for your father's views on all questions. They 
may be wrong ; no doubt many of them are ; but 
you should remember that " knowledge comes 
but wisdom lingers." It may be that you know 
a good deal more than your father. If so, it is 
because you take after your mother ; but whether 
you really know more must be clearly established 
by actual results, and not assumed. 

In order to have a proper respect for your 
father, you must not call him " dad," or " pap," 
or " pa," or " the old gent," or "the governor," 
as I have heard a good many English boys call 
their fathers. There is one name to which he is 
entitled, and he is entitled to that, from you, 
every time ; and that name is " father," never 
" the old gentleman," or worse still " the old 
gent." The very act of calling him father will 
make you respect him and respect yourself, and 
smooth out any little trouble that may arise 
between you. 

It is essential to your moral growth and fu- 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FATHER 7 

ture happiness that yon and your father have the 
most perfect understanding with each other. 
By and by he will come to trust you implicitly. 
First, he will be to you a sort of older brother ; 
as the years go on he will learn to depend on 
you, to lean on you, so to speak, and by and by 
he will be disposed, when he begins to lean 
heavily on his staff, to pay as much deference to 
your opinion as you did to his when you were 
a little boy. You thought then that father 
knew it all. He will think after a while that you 
know it all, and then whatever you do is about 
right because you do it. 

I write this to you because I have known boys 
who took a different course from that which I 
am urging on you, and who have by so doing 
blighted their own lives, and their fathers' lives, 
and broken their mothers' hearts. I do not 
want you to do either. 



CHAPTER II 

the farm boy and his mother 

My dear Boy: 

You will, I am sure, pardon me if I venture 
to write to you on some matters that are in a 
manner sacred, and I do so solely because I 
believe I can do you a great good for which 
you may thank me ever afterward. Your 
Uncle Henry is now over sixty years old, and 
can, therefore, talk to you as he would not have 
dared to talk twenty years ago. He has, all his 
life, had much to do with boys, has boys of his 
own, and thinks that a bright boy, clean in life, 
in word and thought, is every whit as noble and 
admirable a character as a bright, pure-minded, 
beautiful girl. He has, all his life, noticed that 
a boy of this class has almost invariably a good 
mother, and more than that, that he is a good 
"mother's boy" as long as his mother lives. 
You have no doubt read the account of the 
inauguration of President McKinley. You 
remember that his tenderness toward his aged 

8 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS MOTHER 9 

mother, on that occasion, lifted him much 
higher in your estimation than anything he 
said in his inaugural address. You have often 
heard it said of some bad man, " There must 
be something good about him, after all, or he 
would not be so kind to his aged mother." I 
can assure you, right now, that your whole 
after life will depend very much on the way 
you treat your mother. In all past ages men 
have noted this fact. " Honor thy father and 
thy mother," said Paul, " which is the first com- 
mandment with promise." That promise was, 
" That thy days may be long in the land which 
the Lord thy God giveth thee " ; or in the lan- 
guage of the catechism, " Long life and life and 
prosperity to all such as love him and keep his 
commandments." Noting the fact that disobedi- 
ent boys generally come to a bad end, an 
inspired writer said : — 

" The eye that mocketh at his father, — and despiseth to 
obey his mother, 

The ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young- 
eagles shall eat it." 

This is a simple statement of the world-wide 
fact that there is a very close and intimate rela- 
tion between a boy's success in life and the fil- 



10 LETTEES TO THE FARM BOY 

ial affection which he shows to his parents and 
especially to his mother. It is in the home and 
in early childhood that we acquire those quali- 
ties that make us truly successful. We learn 
to love by first loving our mother, we learn 
respect and reverence from our father, and we 
learn to respect the rights of others from our 
brothers and sisters. From my heart I pity the 
boy who is either motherless or fatherless, and 
scarcely less do I pity the only son or daughter. 
They are, almost from necessity, dwarfed speci- 
mens of humanity. 

Note the little apple in the heart of the blos- 
som. The blossom is the home in which the 
fruit is enfolded until it is fit to endure the 
sunshine and the storm. If the blossom is 
injured the apple never amounts to much. 
Even after it grows to maturity and the blos- 
som has long since fallen away, the injury still 
leaves its mark on the apple. So it is in your 
home life. "Poor boy," we often say, "his 
father died when he was a baby," or, " He had 
no mother," or, " He was an only child," when 
we wish to excuse weakness or wickedness for 
which there is no other palliation. 

You are entitled, my dear boy, to all the good 
a good mother can do you, but you can never 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS MOTHER 11 

realize this until you are good to your mother, 
and the one proof of this will be in seeing that 
the wood is always dry, that she has as little 
drudgery as possible to do about the house, and 
that her mind is ever free from care. 

Now, let me tell you of some things that you 
will be tempted to do. Some boy will wish you 
to join him in something of which you know 
your mother would not approve. He will some- 
times sneer at you and call you " mother's boy," 
and say you are " tied to your mother's apron 
strings." I would not advise you to knock that 
boy down, because the sneer is directed at you, 
and you can afford to let it pass, but if he says 
anything against your mother you have my per- 
mission to give him a sound drubbing. Do not 
let any boy of your age or size say a word disre- 
spectful of your mother. Let her religious con- 
victions, her ideas of duty and propriety, her 
faults even, be too sacred to be found fault with 
by mortal man. 

You are likely, as you approach manhood, to 
put too little store by your mother's judgment. 
When a boy gets to be from sixteen to nineteen 
or twenty he is apt to speak lightly of women 
and try to break away from his mother's influ- 
ence. She may not be as good a scholar as you 



12 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

think you are, may not know half as many 
things, but in all matters that affect character 
or life, your Uncle Henry would take her judg- 
ment offhand in preference to yours. When 
you get to know women better than you now 
do, you will find they have a very queer way of 
guessing at the rights of things and guessing 
right — nearly every time. A man reasons, a 
woman divines ; a man thinks things out, a 
woman feels them out. Your mother is not 
infallible, nor yet perfect, but she is so nearly 
certain to be right about matters that affect 
your character and life, that you cannot afford 
to treat her intuitions lightly. If you do, you 
will make a mistake. 

When you become a man you will have a wife 
of your own, or ought to have. You won't own 
it to me, but I suppose you are thinking once in 
a while about it even now. Your mother may be 
a little jealous lest any other woman should share 
your affections ; possibly she may not be able to 
help feeling that way at first ; but let me say to 
you that she knows more about other women than 
you do, or ever will. If you are as good to your 
mother as you ought to be, she will, at the 
proper time, take your girl into her heart and 
life, as a daughter indeed. 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS MOTHER 13 

You will be all the happier if you make your 
mother your confidant in your love affairs. 
Confidentially I may say to you, she is, ordi- 
narily, about the only one of the family you 
can advise with freely on that subject. Your 
brothers and sisters might laugh at you, and you 
for some reason do not like to talk to your father 
about it. I assure you that you can have no 
better adviser, in a matter which may be hap- 
piness or misery unspeakable to you, than your 
own dear mother. 

There is something very beautiful and touch- 
ing in the affection of a mother toward a good 
boy, even when her hair is white and her step 
tottering. His hair, too, may be gray, but to 
her he is a boy still, repaying in tenderness and 
kindness and helpfulness that quenchless love 
which she has lavished upon him from child- 
hood through manhood. By kindness and ten- 
derness, by making her your confidant now, you 
can make your mother the happiest of women, 
and at the same time do much to make your 
own life a complete success. One little act of 
kindness shown her each day will do that. 



CHAPTER III 

the farm boy and his temper 

My dear Boy: 

I have not sized you up as one of the goody- 
goody boys such as too often figure in Sunday- 
school books. Such boys are too often like the 
apples that ripen too early, thereby indicating 
that the tree is on the decline. I do not think 
there is much danger of your dying early on 
account of being too good for this world. I 
have seen you get mad and fight and sometimes 
heard you say words not found in the diction- 
ary. I do not approve of these things ; neither 
will you when you are older; and yet I have 
more hope of a boy built in that way than of 
one who is goody-good, and a great deal more 
than of one who prides himself on his cunning 
and deceit, or who delights in doing little, 
underhanded, mean things, such as telling tales 
out of school, and meanwhile playing the r61e of 
a saint. But, my boy, if you are to make your 
mark in this world you will have to learn to 

14 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS TEMPER 15 

curb your temper, a thing which you can never 
do until you learn to curb your tongue. 

I know how many things there are about the 
farm that make a boy angry and let his tongue 
loose at both ends. There is, for instance, the 
experienced brood sow that will go the wrong 
way when you try to drive her, that will not 
lead worth a cent, and goes about where she 
pleases. Her pigs seem to lie awake nights 
thinking how to get into the garden or 
potato patch, and when you discover the little 
rascals they clear out with an air that seems to 
say : " Didn't we come it over bubby ? " Then 
there is the cow that opens the gate as if her 
horns were hands, and that other cow that kicks 
on the slightest excuse, and generally manages 
to get one foot in the bucket when it is about 
half full. Then, there is the wise old brood 
mare that will come at your call in the pas- 
ture and take the corn out of your hand, 
but if you reach for her foretop, will show 
you her heels, and let you feel them, too, un- 
less you are lively. I do not wonder that you 
get angry and are tempted to take a club to 
the sow, beat the cow with the milk stool, and 
whip the old mare — when you get a chance. I 
have felt exactly that way — many a time. 



16 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

Then, there is the balky horse that looks round 
over his shoulder when he comes to a soft place 
in the road or to a little hill, and stops and stays 
stopped — a regular quitter that will neither be 
coaxed nor forced to budge an inch, and seems 
to enjoy your anger. You may be pushing the 
mower in hay harvest when, about every rod or 
two, the sickle runs into a gopher hill and you 
have to stop and back, and clean off the sickle 
teeth, and are scarcely back to your seat until 
you run into another hill, and this time you say, 
" Confound the gophers," or perhaps worse. Or, 
you may be in a hurry to get off a load of hay 
and get in another before the rain, and the horse 
fork takes a tantrum and drops the forkful too 
soon, or twists around and will not drop it at 
all, and your father loses his temper and comes 
tearing in to know what keeps you so long at 
the barn. 

Oh, the farm is a great place for trying a boy's 
temper. It is almost sure to rain at the very 
time when you are promised a day's fishing, and 
the best horse on the place goes lame when you 
expect to take your best girl to the Fourth of 
July. At least that is the way it used to be. 
Nevertheless, my boy, you will have to get the 
better of your temper, or your life will be some- 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS TEMPER 17 

what of a failure, and the less you curb it the 
more of a failure that life will be. 

For a boy or girl to get angry and fly off the 
handle is somewhat excusable; for a man never 
— well, hardly ever. " Be ye angry and sin 
not," said an inspired apostle who himself 
once got angry and called the chief justice a 
" whited wall," which means simply a first class 
scoundrel. So, I presume, there is an anger that 
is altogether justifiable ; at least I hope so, but 
"let not the sun go down upon your wrath." 
The boy is not supposed to have gained control 
of himself; the man is. I know men, and a 
good many of them, who are very strong in 
many ways, have nearly every other element of 
great success but this one of self-control, and they 
sometimes make stark fools of themselves and 
lose the respect of their best friends because 
they fly in a passion on very slight pretexts ; 
or, what is even worse, sulk, and pout, and then 
go home at night and kick the dog, scold their 
wives (if they dare), and their children go off 
to the barn or to bed for fear of their father's 
anger. This is what may happen to you when 
you become a man, unless you get control of 
your temper and your tongue — while you can. 

Now let me whisper a secret : That cow and 



18 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

the brood mare would not be half so "ornery" 
if somebody had not been in the habit of losing 
his temper. That balky horse would never have 
learned to balk, if his first owner had had good 
horse sense, and learned to control his temper. 
I do not say that any measure of self-control on 
the part of the owner will take the contrariness 
out of a hog, but it will take away the opportu- 
nity of showing it. 

Do you ask me how to control that temper ? 
Let me confess to you that it is not an easy mat- 
ter, but, where there is a will there is a way, 
and a wise father and mother will help you in 
this good work. Your Uncle Henry had a 
furious temper when a boy. He got mad 
when he was turned down at school, and flew 
off the handle about something or other nearly 
every day. He remembers very distinctly his 
first lesson in curbing his temper. His father 
put a J. I. C. bit on him one morning, and 
that very neatly. He did not like something 
at the breakfast table, and on being reproved 
lost his temper — as usual. The first thing he 
knew he got a dash of very cold water in the 
face, and then another — and another. The 
shock enabled him to get control of his nerves. 
He then and there found that he could control 
his temper if he but tried. 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS TEMPER 19 

It is all nonsense to say that a boy cannot con- 
trol his temper. Did I not see you the other 
day in a passion when working on the road? 
The other boys laughed at you, and you looked 
round and saw your best girl coming in a buggy, 
looking as sweet and cool as a rose after a 
shower, and in a second you were all smiles and 
took off your hat to her and felt a little ashamed 
of yourself all that day. I know you remember 
that. No matter how angry you are, you can 
hold your tongue — when a stranger for whom 
you have great respect is present. If you can do 
it with this outside help, you can, if yon try, do 
it without it. 

Bear this in mind, that sinful anger is never 
a mark of strength or of manliness, but always 
of weakness. It is a sign of immaturity — 
vealiness, if you wish to call it by its right name. 
It never contributes to happiness and always 
makes a sensible man feel cheap and mean — 
when he comes to himself. I am free to say 
that I have never been angry, without good 
cause, and let my tongue loose, without afterward 
loathing and despising myself. One cannot 
afford to lose his self-respect, and to maintain 
that self-respect must attain self-control. 

One can sometimes do by indirection what he 



20 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

cannot do directly. When a farm boy I once 
caught a preacher whistling on Sabbath morning. 
I had been taught whistling on the Sabbath was 
a sin, and ventured to ask him why he did it. 
He colored up and said : " I'll tell you, my boy, 
how I fell into the habit. When I was a young 
man, I had a fearfully bad temper and resolved 
to whistle whenever I found my temper rising. 
This helped me by giving me time to think be- 
fore speaking. I then got into the habit of 
whistling whenever I was thinking seriously 
about anything. I was just now thinking over 
my sermon, and it whistled itself." Another 
once told me he got control of his temper by 
counting three before he let his tongue loose on 
the other fellow. Mind this, if you can keep 
your tongue between your teeth, you will have 
little trouble with your temper. 

I don't say a man should never become angry. 
Far less do I say he should not show resentment. 
There are some things on the farm and a thou- 
sand times as many off it calculated to make a 
true man's blood boil and fill him with righteous 
indignation, and he ought by all means to show 
it. Neither man nor boy has any right to stand 
insult or endure wrong without showing resent- 
ment, and that in a most pointed way. A man 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS TEMPER 21 

or boy who allows another to wrong him or in- 
sult him, without resenting it, lacks something 
essential to the proper make-up of a true man, 
and actually becomes an accessory to wrong do- 
ing. I hope the recording angel conveniently 
forgets to report the boy who knocks down the 
bully who, by brute force, terrorizes weaker boys. 
If I had the reporting to do I would look the 
other way, and if I happened to see it would re- 
port a credit mark instead. The public senti- 
ment that justifies a brother in putting a bullet 
hole through the man who has ruined his sister, 
and then made light of it, is not wholly evil. It 
teaches brutes to control their passions and fools 
to hold their tongues. Resentment, however, 
to be effective, must be with perfect self-control. 
If you have to show your teeth, do it deliberately 
and show them just enough and no more. If you 
bite, do it with perfect coolness and to good pur- 
pose. You can never do this unless you learn to 
control your temper. The boy to be feared is 
the boy who can knock you down and smile, 
whose eyes are ablaze with fire and yet under 
perfect control. It is this that marks the really 
strong man that I wish you to be. 

You will be surprised to find how much the 
habits of the stock on the farm will improve 



22 LETTERS TO THE FAEM BOY 

when you get control of yourself. On many 
farms the live stock unconsciously tell the 
observant man just what kind of a temper the 
owner, or some of the boys, or perhaps the hired 
man, has. Remember what Bobbie Burns said : 
"Know, prudent, cautious self-control is wis- 
dom's root." So thinks your Uncle Henry. 



CHAPTER IV 
the farm boy and his chum 

My dear Boy: 

If you are to become the good and true man 
that your father and mother hope you will be, 
it is very important that you choose the right 
kind of a chum. Tell me the kind of a chum 
a boy has, and I will tell you what sort of a 
boy he is, and what type of a man he is likely 
to become. 

I sometimes think that it is essential to the 
right development of a boy that he should have, 
first, a dog ; second, a chum ; and third and 
last, a best girl. It is a little too soon to talk 
about " the last and best," but if you have fallen 
in love with the right kind of a dog and se- 
lected the right kind of a chum, j^ou will not 
go far wrong on the best girl. If you do not 
find her, she will happen in on your path by acci- 
dent, or Providence, when the right time comes. 
Your father knows all about that, I am sure. I 
like the boy that likes a good dog, a dog that 

23 



24 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

is bright, honest, and industrious — that looks 
you squarely in the eye without flinching, and 
will fight for you when it is time to fight. 
There is something wrong with the boy that 
likes a downright mean, cowardly dog — a dog 
with a bad conscience. 

After the dog, but generally along with it, 
comes the chum, and he is the making or mar- 
ring of more boys than parents think. 

I like the boy who has one particular friend 
about his own age, a friend or chum with whom 
he delights to be, and whom he stands by, 
through thick and thin, in all things right and 
honest. We have no right, whether men or 
boys, to stand by any one whom w^e do not 
believe to be in the right. Our allegiance to 
right is above and beyond our obligations to 
any thing or any person on earth. Do not 
forget that. 

If the boy's chum is a thoroughly good, 
manly boy, the mother may feel that her boy 
is safe. It is not every boy, nor every farm 
boy, that is fit to be a farm boy's friend. There 
are whole classes of boys that he should avoid 
as friends, if he does not wish to sup sorrow 
sooner or later. I say "avoid as friends." I 
do not say avoid altogether. You are soon to 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS CHUM 25 

go out into a world that has all sorts of people 
in it, from the worst to the best. You will 
have to mingle with them, more or less, and you 
should learn how to touch the worst and not be 
defiled. You may as well begin now and learn 
to be among the bad and yet not be of them. 

To begin with, have the least possible to do 
with the boy who uses bad language ; who 
loves to tell smutty stories, and who has a low 
opinion of women, especially of girls of his own 
age. That is the worst sort of a boy with 
whom you can have anything whatever to do. 
If you like that kind of a boy, I pity you. I 
pity your father and mother, and I sincerely 
hope you may never marry. If you choose him 
as your friend, you will in a few years not be 
fit to look a decent girl in the face. If you 
should afterward repent and be converted, you 
will not even then be able in all your life to 
get rid entirely of his corrupting influence. I 
know men now who are trying to be Christians, 
and who yet, I am told, when they fall in with 
old chums and the like, vomit filth like a buz- 
zard. These men had filthy chums when they 
were boys, and they will be more or less filthy, 
when they fall in with filthy folks, as long as 
they live. Think what a hell it must be for a 



26 LETTERS TO THE FAEM BOY 

man to carry around with him filthy recollec- 
tions, which in his better moments he loathes 
and hates, and to keep on doing it until the 
end of his days. He had about as well be 
chained to a corpse. Keep your mind clean 
and pure and make no friendship with a filthy- 
minded boy. 

Do not make a chum of a profane boy. He 
may have many good qualities, but he speaks of 
the God who made him in a way that even he 
would not allow any boy to speak of his father 
or mother. Either he does not believe there is 
a Supreme Being, in which case he is not a fit 
companion for you, or he defies Him (which is 
worse), or he is an ignorant fellow and uses 
profane language only by way of emphasis. In 
neither case is he fit to be your chum. You 
expect to be regarded as a gentleman when you 
grow up, and, even if there were no sin in it, 
you do not want to get into the habit of using 
language that by common consent is never 
heard in the society of gentlemen or ladies. 

Under no circumstances choose the bully of 
the neighborhood or of the school for your 
friend. Boys are often tempted to do so. You 
may admire his strength, his seeming courage, 
his brute force; you may think yourself safe 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS CHUM 27 

under his protection. Do not do it. It is brain 
force, combined with moral courage and sterling 
integrity, that rules the world, not self-assertion 
or brute force. Avoid the bully as much as 
possible. Do not quarrel with him; do not 
give him an opportunity, if you can help it, 
to bully you. Keep away from him as much as 
possible, and, when you see that your unwill- 
ingness to submit to his domination is regarded 
as an insult, get two pairs of boxing-gloves and 
practise with your father or brother or the 
hired man in the barn, and then — lick the 
bully, and do it thoroughly. At the bottom, 
the bully is always a coward. 

I suffered much when a boy from this breed 
of cattle. My father told me that if I ever got 
into a fight at school, I would get a licking 
when I came home. I endured tortures from 
the bully of the school because it was known 
that John Wallace would not allow his boys to 
fight. I broke over the rule once, — my father 
never knew it, — and I had peace afterward. 
Why do I insist on this point? I will tell you. 
The bully is a brute as a boy, and will be a 
failure as a man. He develops a type of char- 
acter that makes men fear him and hate him. 
He never has any true friends, and the man 



28 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

that cannot attach men to him as friends is a 
failure, even though he be worth millions. 
You do not wish to develop that type of 
character; therefore do not choose that sort 
of a boy as your chum. 

Do not choose for your chum the boy who 
cannot control his temper. That sort of a boy 
is not safe. He may have many good qualities, 
may mean well, but he is not safe. Solomon, 
the wise old fellow, saw this point long ago 
when he said, " Make no friendship with an 
angry man, and with a furious man thou shalt 
not go." He will make it more difficult for 
you to control your temper, and you never 
know when he will fly off and shame you. 
You had better be loaded down with disease 
or debt than with a temper you cannot control. 

Choose as your chum the boy that respects 
his father, loves his sister, fights for his little 
brother, and adores his mother ; the boy who is 
clean in his speech, and instinctively shuns the 
vulgar and profane ; the boy who never quar- 
rels when it can possibly be avoided, but will 
not be insulted without resenting it in manner 
and words, and if necessary as a last resort, by 
blows ; the boy that is industrious, economical, 
and has a profound respect for things sacred. 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS CHUM 29 

Choose as your chum the boy who has good 
blood in him ; who comes of the best stock of 
people in the neighborhood. It matters little 
whether his father be rich or poor. Wealth 
should cut no figure in a boy's friendships. In 
point of fact, it seldom does. The only real 
republic that exists in this world is the republic 
of boyhood. This is one reason I like boys 
better than I do girls, though I used to like 
girls a good deal, and do yet. Boys do not 
recognize class distinctions until they become 
men and get spoiled. If your father is poor, 
and you are the right sort of a boy, the best 
woman in the neighborhood will be glad to 
welcome you as her boy's chum; and if your 
father is rich, and a wise man, he will welcome 
any manly boy to his home as the friend of his 
son. He knows the value of good blood in a 
boy. By "good blood" I mean that he comes 
from a good family, whose instincts are right, 
who naturally like things that are honest, pure, 
lovely, and of good report, whether they have 
made money or not. If you choose this sort 
of a boy as your chum, it matters very little 
whether you live in town or country. There is 
not much danger of your falling into bad habits. 
Boys of lower instincts may call you proud and 



30 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

stuck up because you try to keep yourself out 
of the dirt. Never mind; down in their heart 
of hearts they respect you all the more for it. 

If you want your chum to be true to you^ 
you must be true to him. A boy who would 
have friends must show himself friendly, and 
there is a friend that sticketh closer than a 
brother. That friend is the right kind of a 
chum. That is not the way the preachers inter- 
pret this text, but it is what Solomon meant; 
at least so thinks Uncle Henry. 



CHAPTER V 

the farm boy and his reading 

My dear Boy: 

I need scarcely tell you that your future will 
be largely influenced by your reading. Tell me 
what a farm boy reads, and I will tell you what 
kind of a boy he is ; tell me what he will con- 
tinue to read, and I will tell you what he is 
likely to become. The boy who is not a reader 
in this day and age of the world is very likely 
to be a nobody. Whether, if he reads, he will 
be any credit to himself or his friends will be 
determined largely by what he reads. The 
farm boy should read, not for amusement or 
recreation, but to learn what he needs, most of 
all, to know. He is a beginner in this world, 
and his future is all before him ; it will be 
about what he makes it, and it is more impor- 
tant for him than any one else to know the 
truth, the real facts of life, and especially those 
facts that bear upon the profession, business, or 
occupation that he may choose for the future. 

31 



62 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

The farm boy of all others has no time to fool 
away in reading truck, of which, I am sorry to 
say. the world is altogether too full. Of books, 
I would say, first of all, read the Bible. Its 
first chapters are the oldest literature of the 
world. You want to know where you came 
from, what you are here for, and where you are 
going. This is the only Book that can tell you 
anything trustworthy and accurate regarding 
these three all-important questions. I would 
not have you read the Bible solely as a reli- 
gious duty, nor have you regard it with super- 
stitious reverence. I would have you read it as 
you would any other book that contains infor- 
mation which it is of the utmost importance for 
you to know. It is the only book, that I know 
or ever heard of, that tells you the exact truth 
about men and things. It is the only book that 
teaches the absolutely correct way of living, and 
states principles, belief in which is essential to 
the highest success, even in this life. I would 
have you read this until it becomes like the iron 
in your blood, and would have you do so all the 
same if there were no other world than this. 
The great nations of the world are all readers 
of this Book; so are all its really great men. 
The just laws of the world all have their roots 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS READING 33 

in it. It teaches men how to keep clean mor- 
ally, mentally, and spiritually; and, of what- 
ever else you may safely remain ignorant, you 
cannot afford not to know what this Book 
teaches. I would, therefore, first of all, have 
you read this Book which the people who have 
made the world what it is believe to contain 
the revealed will of God. You can make no 
mistake here. If it condemns you, it does so 
to make a man of you ; if it commends your 
course, you need not fear for the future, either 
in this world or the next. By all means read 
the Bible. 

As to other books, it is easier to tell you 
what not to read than to read. If you wish to 
learn how to express yourself in the clearest, 
simplest, and most forcible English, read Bun- 
yan's Pilgrim's Progress. It will teach you 
much more than this, but it is worth reading, 
for this only, once a year for the next ten years. 
If you wish to know what men, and especially 
women, are, master Shakespeare. Read the 
plays over and over until you get hold of the 
leading idea and purpose of each play — then 
study the characters in detail. You can afford 
to read some of these plays every year. 

I would have you a man of few books. There 



34 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

are but few books in this world that the farm 
boy has time to read, or that it would pay him 
to read. It is the man who reads few books, 
and reads them over and over again until they 
are part of his being, so to speak, incorporated 
in his very nature, that will make headway in 
the world. He is the man to be feared by his 
foes and trusted by his friends. Never under 
any circumstances read a book that is written in 
bad spirit, that sneers at things sacred, that 
raises doubts which it cannot satisfy, or a ques- 
tion which it does not attempt to answer fully 
and fairly. 

You say you have no time to read these books. 
Take an old farm boy's word for it, you have 
more time now than you are likely ever to have 
again. Now, as to your school books : Master 
them every one completely and thoroughly. 
Do not finally lay awa} r a school book until you 
are certain that you know everything that it can 
teach you. It is not the man who knows a little 
of everything that makes a success of life, but 
the man who knows a few things and knows all 
about them. In addition to this, read history, 
particularly of your own country and of the 
English people and of the race or nation from 
which your fathers sprang. With diligence you 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS READING 35 

can do all this before you leave the farm, if you 
ever leave it. Whether you are a farmer or a 
business man, you will never regret taking this 
advice. I want you to be a strong man, fit for 
any position you may be called upon to take in 
the world. You cannot do it unless you are a 
reader, a thorough reader, and a reader of the 
right kind of books. 

You will read newspapers of course. You do 
not lose much by not having the chance to read 
a daily paper. A good weekly paper will give 
you all the news of the world that is really 
worth knowing. Your county paper should give 
you all the local news. You should alwaj^s 
keep yourself posted on what is going on in 
your own community. If you wish a monthly 
compendium of the best thoughts and most 
important events of the world, take a magazine 
on the general plan of the Review of Reviews. 
It will cost you two or three dollars a year and 
will give you the best things in magazines you 
cannot buy and have no time to read. I would 
have you throw aside any newspaper that is 
written in a bad spirit, or that would make you 
believe that the world, this country in particular, 
is going to the bad, or that will make you believe 
that the parties to which your folks do not 



36 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

belong are made up mainly of bad men. You 
will be told continually by these papers that the 
republicans are rogues, the democrats, fools, or 
the populists, cranks. Now, there are some 
rogues among the republicans, some fools among 
the democrats, and some cranks among the pop- 
ulists. The great majority, by far, of all these 
parties are good people who wish well for their 
country and are patriotic to the core, but differ 
honestly as to public policies. The newspaper 
that teaches that the bulk of all other parties 
are evil and enemies to their country is a news- 
paper that is not fit for a farm boy to read. 
Avoid every book or paper that apparently loves 
to point out the evil in other men. That paper 
or book is itself evil, and the fact that it gloats 
over evil is the best of all proof of its unfitness 
for any healthy farm boy to read. 

I do not say that you should not read novels, 
but you have no time to read them now. When 
your mind is more mature, when you need recre- 
ation and mental rest, you can read novels 
profitably ; not the blood and thunder variety 
nor the sentimental truck, but novels like those 
of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens that por- 
tray human nature truthfully. At present stick 
closely to books and papers that give you the 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS READING 37 

facts which you need for your guidance in 
life. This letter, my dear boy, may seem like 
a sermon, but believe me, it states exactly 
what I would do if I were once more a farm 
boy. 



CHAPTER VI 
the farm boy and his future business 

My dear Boy: 

Next to selecting a wife, the most important 
step you will take in the next twenty years will 
be the selection of the business in which you are 
to earn your bread and butter. It is possible 
this may be chosen for you. You may be the 
only son, or the oldest son, you may be thor- 
oughly in love with farming, and entirely con- 
tent with the lot that has been cast for you. If 
so, I count you happy, very happy indeed. If 
you will now but read and think and keep your 
eyes open, your ears also, and become a thor- 
oughly up-to-date or a little-ahead-of-the-times 
farmer, while you may not get very rich, you 
will have a good chance to get as much real 
good out of life as any man I know. 

It may be, however, that there are a good 
many boys in your family, more than the farm 
will support ; or it may be that you do not like 
farming, or that you have the town fever. You 

38 



FARM BOY AND HIS FUTURE BUSINESS 89 

may have neighbors and neighbors' boys who 
think that farmers are an oppressed people, Ish- 
maelites, with every man's hand against them, 
and you may have taken up with their notions ; 
or you may really be better fitted by nature for 
something else than farming. In either case I 
want to have a square talk with you, whether it 
does you any good or not. To begin with, I do 
not think that all boys born on the farm should 
stay on it. There are too many of them. It 
will take fewer and fewer people to do the 
farming of the future, that is, in proportion to 
population — fewer and better farmers. The 
towns and cities need this over-plus of the 
farm. 

There are two kinds of boys which the town 
(and when I speak of the town I mean the 
members of all the other professions and lines 
of business which for the most part live in town 
or city) can use. These kinds or classes of 
boys are, first, the really bright, thinking, pro- 
gressive boys, strong in health, vigorous in 
mind, clear in thought, energetic in action, hon- 
est in purpose; and second, the young fellows 
who do not like the farm, who think that for- 
tunes can be easily made in town, that town 
life is an easy life; who are not ambitious; 



40 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

who had a soft snap on their mother's breast 
when they came into the world, and have been 
looking for a soft snap ever since — born tired 
— possibly not their fault, who are willing to 
be hitched and unhitched like their father's 
horses. The town can use both these classes — 
the first in conducting the great business enter- 
prises on which depends the prosperity of both 
city and country. It can use the second class 
on the streets, or in the factories and offices 
where the work is done by the day or hour and 
but one thing is to be done, which becomes 
automatic after a while so that they can almost 
fall asleep and keep on doing it. 

This last class is very apt to take the town or 
city fever. To them the city seems high life, fine 
houses, nice lawns, lighted and paved streets, peo- 
ple well dressed, working in shady offices, crowds 
on the streets, bands of music, pretty girls, 
churches, theatres, games, society, comfort. 
They do not know and cannot be made to 
believe, except by experience, that every city 
has a Whitechapel where vice reigns supreme, 
and which no city in the world has been able to 
control fully, much less entirely suppress. 
They do not know the careworn faces filled 
with failures, tailings, so to speak, which the 



FARM BOY AND HIS FUTURE BUSINESS 41 

town has hidden out of the way — faces that 
look out of the windows on the back streets. 

If you think, my dear boy, that town life is 
easier than county life, on the whole, or that 
it gives more average comfort, or that it has 
less care or requires less exertion, or that, on 
the average, it makes better men, then you are 
entirely mistaken. The farm boys who came 
to town and, after ten, fifteen, or twenty years 
of close application, live in those fine houses 
and run those large establishments and shape 
the policies of the city and state are of a differ- 
ent class of boys altogether. They are the 
boys who learned on the farm to ride and shoot 
and tell the truth. The first gave them cour- 
age, the second, accuracy and steadiness of pur- 
pose, and the third, that integrity that lies at 
the basis of all success in life ; in short, the 
qualities that make a man a success on the 
farm will make him a success in the city ; and 
the qualities which make him a success in the 
city will make him a success on the farm. 

If you who are on a farm wish to choose 
some other profession or business (and I do not 
say that you should not), you should understand, 
first of all, that success can be won in none 
without indomitable energy, hard work, and a 



42 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

determination to succeed that can be baffled by 
no difficulty, and in no case without integrity 
of character. I wish to whisper in your ear 
that you can acquire these qualifications easier 
on the farm than you can anywhere else ; there- 
fore do not be in a hurry about choosing your 
profession. Your constant care should be to 
acquire those qualities that lie at the basis of 
success in any business that a man ought to fol- 
low; in other words, in any honest business. 
When you are rooted and grounded in these, it 
is entirely safe to choose the business which 
suits your inclinations and naturally opens up 
to you. 

I am a great believer in Providence, by which 
I do not mean anything supernatural or special. 
I believe that every boy's life is a plan of God, 
and if he acquires character, integrity, or com- 
plete wholeness or soundness, — that is, becomes 
what farmers call a straight up and down 
man, — there will be in due time and at the 
right time an opening that will lead him into 
the line of business which he ought to follow. 
I believe that, if a boy prepares himself by 
acquiring all the information possible, avoiding 
bad habits, bad company, and uses his time to 
the best advantage, matters will so shape them- 



FARM BOY AND HIS FUTURE BUSINESS 43 

selves that he will find himself in the place 
where he of right belongs. Opportunities come 
right along to the man who is ready to use 
them. If the farm boy has acquired habits of 
industry, economy, truthfulness, and upright- 
ness, and his inclination leads him to be a 
preacher, lawyer, physician, or business man, 
he need not have the slightest fear of failure 
(barring accidents and sickness, or ill-fated 
marriage), if he will but take the first opening 
that points in the direction of his inclinations. 
Rest assured, however, that nothing worth hav- 
ing in this life ever comes without hard work, 
clear thinking, and right living. 

There are, perhaps, some boys on the farm 
who imagine there is some short cut to wealth; 
that dishonesty wins ; that rogues prosper ; and 
that it is little matter how you get money, or 
office, provided only you get it. This is about 
the worst mistake any boy can possibly make, 
and the boy who has that notion and does not 
get over it, can be very safely set down as a 
foreordained failure. There is nothing in this 
world that pays so large a dividend, in the long 
run, as good old-fashioned honesty. I do not 
mean the corporation style of honesty. I mean 
old-fashioned uprightness, which is more than 



44 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

paying debts, and much more than telling the 
truth — in form. It is doing the right thing at 
the right time, in the right way, with every man, 
whether friend or foe, at all times- — everywhere. 
There are not half enough of men imbued with 
this kind of uprightness to meet the demand. 
They are wanted in every great store, factory, 
and bank, and it is this kind of men that in the 
end lead in all the professions. A farm is the 
best place in the world to grow this kind of 
boys and men ; therefore, do not be in a hurry 
to leave the farm, and do not make a final 
choice of your profession or business until you 
are sure you are doing the right thing. If you 
conclude to stay on the farm and be a really up- 
to-date farmer, I am sure that you will get the 
maximum of comfort. If you choose something 
else and succeed, j t ou will, in all probability, after 
success has been achieved, want to go back to 
the farm. The most of the farm boys who have 
the town fever and come to town and fail 
would get back if they could. Mind you, I do 
not say that you should not leave the farm, but 
do not be in a hurry to make up your mind. 
First, be sure you are right, then go ahead, is 
the advice of Uncle Henry. 



CHAPTER VII 

the farm boy and his fun 

My dear Boy : 

I have written to you thus far on the serious 
things of life, the matters that will affect di- 
rectly your future usefulness, and the neglect 
or observance of which will do very much to 
make you a failure or a success in life. I have 
said nothing about amusements, or as you say, 
" fun," and you may, perhaps, wonder whether 
your father and your Uncle Henry ever had 
any fun when they were boys. Your father, 
perhaps, does not say much to you about his 
boyhood. He is so fully occupied in looking 
after his farm and stock that he says little to 
you about the fun he had when he was a boy, 
thinking perhaps it was beneath the dignity of 
a grave, middle-aged, and busy man. You some- 
times wonder whether he ever had a boy's life, 
whether he learned to dance, to shoot, or skate, 
or play foot-ball ; or whether he went to 
the show or circus. You can make up your 

45 



46 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

mind that lie went to the show every time he 
had a chance, and, after looking at the wild 
animals hastily, took in the circus ; that your 
grandfather went with him to see that no harm 
happened to him, and that your father might 
have been seen eating gingerbread and casting 
sheep's eyes at one of the prettiest girls in the 
neighborhood, who may now, perhaps, be your 
mother. Besides, he no doubt went coon hunt- 
ing in August and September, went to corn- 
huskings, perhaps was the captain at one of 
these ancient contests, and was on the lookout 
for red ears ; and if you ask him he may tell 
you what that means. He went to apple- 
butter boilings, and to wood choppings when 
there was a quilting bee on the same farm at 
the same time. If a fiddler would even now 
strike up one of the old, simple melodies, I'll 
venture that you would notice a far-away, 
reminiscent look in his eyes, and his feet might 
even keep time to the long-forgotten music. 

If he did not go to all these things, your 
Uncle Henry did, and a right good time he had, 
particularly when it came to getting away with 
the nice things with which the tables groaned 
in those days. There was something particu- 
larly fine about the old-time pies and cakes, 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FUN 47 

fried chicken, sweet potatoes, doughnuts, and 
apple dumplings. Sometimes I wonder whether 
women have forgotten how to cook ; and then, 
again, I wonder whether a boy's appetite does 
not account for the superiority of the old-time 
cooking. I presume the last is the correct 
solution. To be perfectly honest about it, 
I would rather go coon hunting even yet, than 
go to base-ball or foot-ball, and if I heard the 
well-known bark of the best coon dog in the 
neighborhood, that showed a coon up a tree at 
midnight, I think I would get up at once and 
start after that coon a good deal more readily 
than I am now or ever was accustomed to get 
up on a cold morning. 

Your father, if he is the wise man I take him 
to be, wants you to have fun, not as the busi- 
ness of life, but as its recreation; your Uncle 
Henry regards fan, genuine, kindly fun, as 
essential to a boy's development as food, cloth- 
ing, or education. In fact, amusement is educa- 
tion in the broadest, truest sense of the word ; 
but it should be the spice of life and not the 
substantials ; the pie and custard after the 
meal and not the meal itself. There is, how- 
ever, healthy and wholesome fun, and unhealthy 
and vicious fun. The one is life, the other is 



48 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

death. One develops true manhood, the other 
dwarfs it. The boy who learns to enjoy the 
right kind of fun when a boy will enjoy it all 
his days ; and the more genuine fun he has 
whether boy or man as the diversion of life, the 
longer he is likely to live, and the better his life 
is likely to be. I expect to have fun or diver- 
sion all my days, and the longer I live the 
better I seem to enjoy it. 

Now, as to these different kinds of fun; 
there is no real, genuine fun in anything that 
is bad or vicious, nor is there any fun in any- 
thing you would be ashamed to have your 
mother know all about. There is no genuine 
fun in playing with a pack of greasy cards in 
the hay loft. If your mother approves of play- 
ing cards, do it in the sitting room ; if she 
does not approve of it, do not play at all. I do 
not know one card from another, and I do not 
think I will lose anything if I never learn. 

There is no genuine fun in inflicting needless 
pain on anything that lives. The fun that 
does a boy good nearly always involves some 
kind of physical exercise, and with that skill of 
a high order. Every boy should learn to shoot, 
to ride, to swim, and to play ball where the 
games do not necessarily involve risk of life or 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FUN 49 

l.mb, or an undue strain on some physical organ. 
I do not like some features of foot-ball ; but it 
has, nevertheless, the essential feature of all 
good outdoor games, intense energy in action. 
That is what we all enjoy, whether in a horse- 
race, base-ball, or foot-ball. The farm boy natu- 
rally takes to amusements which require physical 
exercise rather than such games as chess and 
billiards, which require more delicate skill and 
calculation, — and for the same reason that lambs 
and colts and calves and even pigs play, — to 
develop his muscles. As we get older, and the 
muscular system becomes fully developed, we 
care less for these exciting games and take our 
amusements in a more quiet way. 

Fun, however, is not all physical. Every 
farm boy should belong to a lyceum or literary 
society, and should cultivate by way of amuse- 
ment, not merely the intellectual side of his 
nature, but his gifts of wit and humor. It will 
be a great help to every farm boy in after life 
if he will learn to be a good story-teller. Story- 
tellers, we are quite well aware, are born and 
not made, as are orators and poets, but every 
boy, not totally devoid of wit and humor, can 
learn to be a reasonably good story-teller if he 
will but study and practise. I have always 



50 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

regretted that, while at college, I failed to join 
a club which met once a month for the sole pur- 
pose of practice in telling first-class stories. 
The man who can tell a clean story that spar- 
kles with wit and humor is always a favorite. 
He is the life of every company. It makes suc- 
cess as a public speaker comparatively easy, and 
the ability to tell a first-class story or get off a 
really good joke helps a man out of many 
difficulties all through life. A farm boy can 
have plenty of clean fun in learning how to tell 
a good story. In fact, I know of no better way. 
You will see, therefore, my dear boy, that 
your father and I want you to have lots of fun. 
There is no reason why your life should not 
have sport in it and plenty of it. You will be 
all the better for it both as boy and man. " All 
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Fun 
is not the end of life by any means, but it makes 
life better worth the living. Only let the fun 
be clean and wholesome, whether it be in the 
line of sports which develop strength of muscle, 
steadiness of aim, skill of hand, control of nerves, 
or whether it be in games that require accurate 
calculation, or whether in telling stories or jokes. 
No right-minded boy will ever willingly listen 
to a vulgar, or even half-vulgar story, no mat- 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS FUN 51 

ter how funny it may- be. A vulgar story is 
absolutely corrupting, — a sin per se, — and 
should exclude the teller from every decent 
company on the face of the earth. 

There is no reason why a farm boy, when he 
comes of age, should not have had twenty-one 
years of life as full of joy as can be experienced 
off the farm or on the farm in the twenty-one 
years that follow, provided always that he lives 
in a fairly good neighborhood. Even if he does 
not, he can get more real fun out of the colts 
and calves and pigs, and especially out of a 
first-class collie or other well-bred dog, than the 
average town boy gets out of all the sources 
of amusement that are at his disposal. After 
all, there is no place on earth where real genu- 
ine fun can be had so cheaply and so easily as 
on a well-managed stock-farm. 



CHAPTER VIII 
the farm boy and his education 

My dear Boy: 

You are, perhaps, growing restive on the 
farm. It has been the dream of your life to 
secure an education. You have envied the man 
who could talk well from the pulpit or plat- 
form ; who could write for the newspapers ; 
and you attributed this power to the fact that 
he had some time or other secured an educa- 
tion. You have heard it stated so often that 
an education is a fortune in itself, that cannot 
be stolen or lost or burnt up, that you believe 
it, and think that your fortune would be made 
if you could secure an education. You have, 
perhaps, talked to your father about it, and he 
has discouraged you. He has possibly said to 
you, as mine did to me over and over again, 
that an education would unfit you for the farm ; 
or perhaps, that he would like above all things 
to give you an education, but that an education 
is expensive, and that it is entirely beyond his 

52 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS EDUCATION 53 

power, in view of his obligations to your broth- 
ers and sisters. You talk with your mother 
about it, and she sympathizes with you, tells 
you she will do the best she can, perhaps cries 
over the fact that it is not in the power of the 
family to afford jon this education. You have, 
perhaps, become discouraged over this state of 
affairs and concluded that, after all, there is 
nothing left for you but to plod along, make 
a living as best you can, crippled for life for 
want of an education which some of your 
chums are in a fair way to secure. 

If so, you are taking a view of the subject 
entirely too dismal. There are three points I 
should like you to bear in mind : First, that 
there are hundreds, yes thousands, of graduates 
of colleges who would like to change places 
with you, provided they had now the money 
they have spent for their education. They 
would use it to make a first payment on an 
" eighty " and stock it, and be content to be 
farmers all their days. 

Second, that there are thousands of boys of 
your age now receiving an education who, when 
they graduate, will have contracted expensive 
habits and will be kicked round like old shoes 
in the street, by practical business men, and for 



54 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

the simple reason that their education has not 
taught them to do any one thing well. 

Third, that a large per cent of the men who 
are moulding and shaping the policies of the 
neighborhood, of the state, and of the nation, 
had no better opportunities for an education 
than lie clearly within your reach. They suc- 
ceeded and you can succeed, provided you have 
sufficient sand, or clear grit. 

First, I would like you to get a clear idea of 
what constitutes an education which is of any 
practical value. It is not something that can 
be poured into you as you pour water into a 
bucket. A good many townspeople and some 
farmers talk about sending their children away 
to be educated, as they send the sugar box to 
the store to be filled. This cannot be done 
successfully, no matter what time or money may 
be at hand. The human mind takes in knowl- 
edge as the plant takes up moisture, by free 
action from within, and grows, and is trained 
or educated, by the act of appropriating knowl- 
edge. No teacher, no book, no school or college 
can educate you. You must educate yourself. 

You envy the town boy who has the oppor- 
tunity of going to the high school where he can 
learn Latin and Greek, higher mathematics, geol- 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS EDUCATION 55 

ogy, botany, and all that, without paying either 
board or tuition. You say that if you had that 
chance you would get an education. Whether 
you would or not depends on what sort of a boy 
you are. The education you will get in the high 
school, or any other school, will depend on how 
hungry you are for knowledge, how willing you 
are to apply yourself, and the natural strength of 
your mind. As a rule, I do not believe the town 
boy who graduates from the high school is any 
better fitted for the duties of life than the country 
boy who graduates from a good country school at 
the corner of four sections in the West or at the 
cross-road in the East. The town boy knows 
more things, perhaps, but the probability is that 
he does not know them any better, and lacks the 
superabundant health, the keen, inquiring mind, 
and the practical knowledge that the farm boy, if 
he is worth bringing up, will acquire on the farm. 
Before going any further, let me ask you if 
you have gotten all you can get out of the 
little white schoolhouse at the corner of the 
four sections? Have you mastered the three 
R's — readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmetic ? Are you 
quite sure that you are thorough master of 
these ? Can you solve all the problems which 
come up on the farm ? Can you measure with 



56 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

the chain the different fields and tell how many 
acres are in them, as accurately as your father 
can, by merely ploughing them for the last ten or 
fifteen years ? Can you tell how many bushels 
of corn there are in the different cribs or in the 
barn ? How many cubic feet of air there are in 
each room in the house ? How many gallons 
will the well or cistern hold ? Can you spell ac- 
curately and pronounce correctly? Can you 
punctuate ? Can you write a legible hand, and 
read so as to convey to the hearer the exact sense 
of what you read ? You can learn all these things 
at the country school, and if you can do all this, 
you can do more than can some college graduates 
of my acquaintance. If not, you had better take 
down your school books and master their con- 
tents so thoroughly that they will be like the 
iron in your blood. 

Do not think for a moment that I undervalue 
an education. No one can well value it more 
highly than your Uncle Henry. It is the edu- 
cated mind that rules the world, from the farm 
to the throne. I want you to have an education 
that will bring out the best that is in you ; I 
want you to get it yourself, the only way this 
kind of an education can ever be had ; and the 
place to begin is with the three R's and just 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS EDUCATION 57 

where you are — on the farm. If you are deter- 
mined to have this sort of an education, nothing 
can keep you from it. " Who wills, can." 
Until you yourself give up, you can never be 
beaten in anything within the limits of reason- 
able ability. If you are (I had rather not say 
contented) determined to be a farmer, which I 
hope you are, you can be a really well-edu- 
cated farmer without any financial aid from 
anybody. 

Devote the next year or two to mastering thor- 
oughly the subjects taught in your common 
school. Get on good terms with the teacher, 
whether you go to school or not, and get his, or 
her, help. Put your w r its to work in gathering 
together enough, money during the next year or 
two to give you one term at the Agricultural Col- 
lege of your state. Send for a catalogue, map out 
the studies that you wish to pursue, and keep your 
mind constantly at work in that direction. If 
you accomplish these two things in the next year, 
or two years, you will make a first-class start in 
the direction of getting an education, and, when 
you go to college you will go with a first-class 
thirst for knowledge, with a determination to 
get it, and you will succeed. The boy who starts 
in this way will " educate " twice as fast as the 



58 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

boy whose father sends him to be educated, with 
plenty of spending money. 

Meanwhile, do not neglect your reading, but 
be careful what you read. The habit of read- 
ing worthless books is not a virtue but a vice. 
The habit of skimming over good books is a 
vice of scarcely less magnitude. The man to 
be prized by friend and dreaded by foe is the 
man who reads few books, but those of the best, 
and reads them so that he not merely knows all 
they contain, but catches their spirit. 

Whether you are to be a farmer or a profes- 
sional man, give close attention to farm prob- 
lems. One of the worst humbugs of the day is 
the idea that prevails among educated men that 
a knowledge of the dead languages is very 
important, if not essential, to the training, or 
education, of the mind. That their study gives 
this training is true. They act as a grindstone 
on which to sharpen the mind; but the prob- 
lems on the farm, such as the various move- 
ments of water in the soil, the structure of the 
plant, the digestion and assimilation of food by 
live stock, the detection of diseases among 
plants and animals, and the best methods of 
prevention and cure, furnish as good a grind- 
stone upon which to sharpen your mind as the 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS EDUCATION 59 

languages peoples used who have been dead 
more than two thousand years. Education, 
after all, is simply the fitting of the eye to see, 
of the hand to work, of the mind to perceive 
the truth, of the tongue or pen to express it; 
and it is by the practice of all these that we 
educate ourselves and become strong, clear- 
headed men. You will see, therefore, that edu- 
cation is not a bonanza given to the rich ; that 
it is something that cannot be cornered like 
grain on the market ; something, too, of which 
the man who has the determination to get it 
cannot be robbed, and that the measure of the 
education which any man can receive under 
any circumstances, is determined mainly by two 
things, his natural gifts and his determination 
to develop them. Neither money, nor schools, 
nor teachers, nor position, nor anything else 
can make a strong man out of a boy who has 
not the brains to begin with, or who has not 
the thirst for knowledge and the determination 
to get it. If you have these you will get the 
education, no matter how far off it may seem 
now. If you do not have them, nothing in this 
world can give you a real education. 

It will help you a good deal if you will from 
time to time inquire into the history of men 



60 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

who are making things go, about as they wish, 
in state and nation. Many of these men never 
saw the inside of a college, of an academy, or a 
high school. They had no more money with 
which to obtain an education than you now 
have. They do not, even yet, have what the 
world calls an education, but they have the real 
education, the development of the mind, that 
pow r er which the real education gives ; that is 
what you are after, or should be ; and having 
that you have everything. What you need is 
to be thoroughly waked up, I have had many 
teachers in the course of my life, some of them 
drill masters and Gradgrinds who pounded a lot 
of knowledge into me which was of no particu- 
lar use then, or afterwards, and others who 
filled me with boundless enthusiasm, who set 
before me a high ideal intellectually and mor- 
ally. The latter are the only profitable teachers 
I ever had. This is precisely what I am trying 
to do for you. If I can thoroughly awaken you 
to the fact that there is but one life before you, 
that you must make the very best out of the 
talent nature has given you, — must " hitch 
your wagon to a star," — I shall have done what 
I started out to do in writing these letters. If 
you take my advice, you will thank me to your 
dying day. 



CHAPTER IX 

the farm boy and his start in life 

My dear Boy: 

You have, no doubt, from time to time heard 
your father or your mother, or both, say that if 
they could only live to see their children well 
started in life, they would be entirely satisfied. 
For this they cheerfully toil, save, and endure 
hardships and privations that come to all of us 
sooner or later. They are not so particular as 
to what business or profession their children 
may adopt. They would prefer to have the 
boys become farmers and the girls farmers' 
wives, and settle somewhere near them ; for 
to the parents the children are children long 
after the grandchildren come. While they 
would prefer, as a rule, that their children 
should be farmers, they will not object to one 
or more of the flock engaging in business. 
Many mothers would like to have one of their 
sons become a preacher; and every mother 
would like to see her daughters married to 

61 



62 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

men of good character and well to do. This is 
what they mean by a start in life. 

If you keep your ears open when talking to 
farmers who have not succeeded well, you will 
frequently hear them say that the trouble with 
them was that they never had a start, and that 
other men have succeeded because they had a 
start. Some lay the blame for not having a 
start to being born poor ; others to ill health ; 
others to a sickly wife or children. A few are 
honest enough to admit that they spent their 
best years in sowing wild oats, and are now 
reaping the ever ripening harvest. They have 
evidently given up the hope of ever doing more 
than making some sort of a living, and give as 
an excuse that they failed to get a good start at 
the right time. 

If you will get on intimate terms with the 
men who have made a success of farming (and 
I advise you on general principles to do this), 
some of these men may tell you how it was that 
they got their start while others failed. You 
will be surprised, if you get down into the his- 
tory of the lives of successful men, to learn how 
few of them ever got a start with money given 
to them by relatives. You will find in almost 
every case that these successful men made their 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS START IN LIFE 63 

own start ; and where they did not make their 
own start, they were thoroughly and, as they 
thought at the time, severely trained by parents 
who knew from their own experience some 
things which I will try to tell you in this letter. 

The point I wish to impress upon your mind 
is that this getting a start is one of the most 
important things in your whole life. You came 
into this world, if I recollect right, about eigh- 
teen or twenty years ago. Time has been push- 
ing you on right along. It has never stopped a 
minute for jo\i to think what you will do. It 
will never stop until it pushes you through to 
the other world. It gives you one chance, and 
only one. By this I mean that you have but 
one life to live, and if you are to make a success 
in life, you must start right. If you fail in this, 
while you may redeem j^ourself to a greater or 
less extent, you will never be the man that your 
mother and father hope you will be, or that 
your Creator intended you to be. As time will 
not stop for you to think, you had better do a 
good deal of solid thinking while your time is 
going on, as to how you can make the right 
kind of a start in life. You will never in all 
your life spend time more profitably. 

In the first place, I want you to rid yourself 



64 LETTEES TO THE FABM BOY 

entirely of the idea that a start in life means 
merely the accumulation by inheritance, by gift, 
by trickery of one kind or another, or even by 
honest work, of enough money to set you up in 
business. More or less money is essential to a 
successful start in life. But after all it is not 
the start, even when earned by your own hands 
and brain. It is the evidence that the start has 
been made, but it is not by any means the start. 
Most farm boys think that if they had a thou- 
sand dollars, or even five hundred, they would 
be well started. They say, " It takes money to 
make money." While there is some truth in 
this, it is not by any means the whole truth. 
The real start in life does not consist in what a 
man has, but what he is - ; and the value of a 
money start is not in the money at all, but in 
the qualities of body, mind, and heart that have 
been developed in making that money honestly. 
The boy who is shrewd enough and dishonest 
enough to make by sharp practice, by overreach- 
ing, or by gambling on the Board of Trade, a 
thousand dollars by the time he is twenty-five 
years old may think he has made a good start. 
Some of his neighbors, too, may think so. His 
father and mother may be foolishly proud of 
him. Verily, verily I say unto you, he has 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS START IN LIFE 65 

made a start the wrong way, and it were a 
thousand times better for him if he had saved 
even one hundred dollars in that time by hon- 
est work and careful economy. In the last 
forty years your Uncle Henry has seen a good 
many young men make that kind of a start, and 
to-day he cannot think of one of them who is 
not either scratching a poor man's head, or has 
failed to retain the confidence of those who 
know him. 

If you are to succeed, you must get a start of 
the right kind, and you cannot get that without 
a good deal of hard work, close economy, and 
more or less of self-sacrifice. You will have to 
work, and you will have to think, and you will 
have to do without a good many things which, 
at the first blush, you would like to have. I 
will first tell you about some ways in which you 
will not get a start. You will not get the right 
kind of a start by going in debt for a courting 
buggy, or spending your evenings in going to 
dances, circuses, etc., with some good-looking 
girl, who, if she would speak out, does not value 
you above one of her hairpins, who eats your 
caramels and ice cream, thinking, if she thinks 
about you at all, that you are a silly goose for 
wasting your substance in that kind of enter- 



66 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

tainment. She more than half suspects that the 
buggy is not paid for, she knows you are wear- 
ing more fashionable clothes than you can afford, 
and she secretly makes up her mind that while 
she will have all the fun she can w 7 ith you, she 
will say " Yes " to a young man of an entirely 
different stamp. 

You will not get a start in life by forming the 
bad habit of smoking or chewing, or drinking 
beer and an occasional glass of whiskey, nor by 
having " a high old time " when you go to Chi- 
cago, Kansas City, or Buffalo with a carload of 
your father's cattle. 

You will not get a very good start in life by 
imagining that, being raised on the farm, you 
therefore know all about farming, concluding 
that books and papers which discuss farm prob- 
lems are not worth your notice. 

No matter what business you may choose, 
there are three or four things that you must 
have if you are to start right in life. You must 
have a capacity for steady, persistent, hard work. 
There is no honest business or profession in life 
in which this is not a prime requisite and an 
absolute condition of success. 

You must think as well as work. It takes 
more than hard work to win. It takes hard, 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS START IN LIFE G7 

intelligent work, where the thinking brain 
guides the hand, work done according to a well- 
defined purpose. My father used to say to me, 
" Henry, if you don't think, it makes very little 
difference whether you work or not." That was 
sound advice fifty years ago ; it is sounder ad- 
vice to-day than it was then. 

Getting a start in life means being absolutely 
honest. I do not mean by honesty merely the 
willingness to pay debts. That is a part of 
honesty, but a small part. I mean uprightness, 
integrity, reliability, truthfulness. I mean that 
quality wrapped up in all these words that will 
lead your neighbors, and all who have any busi- 
ness with you, to rely upon you absolutely with 
the utmost confidence that you will do what you 
say you will do, and that you can be depended 
upon under any circumstances; or, in the ex- 
pressive language of the farm, that you " will 
do to tie to." 

Now, the value of the first thousand dollars 
you may earn is not in the money, but in the 
training that making it, in an honest way, will 
give you. Therefore, start out to make this 
thousand dollars, in any honest way, by your 
own unaided efforts, digging it out as the miner 
digs the gold out of the Klondike. There will 



68 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

not be so much trouble in the making of it as 
in the saving, in avoiding the spending of it for 
useless things, and in putting it out at interest 
as fast as made ; or better still, investing it in 
young stock to which you will give your per- 
sonal care, and thus learn to feed and breed, to 
buy and sell. It is astonishing how fast a 
young man on the farm who has a kind and 
wise father can accumulate money in this way, 
and with it the qualities of mind, and heart, 
and hand, that make the real start in life — no 
matter what the future profession may be. 
When these qualities have once been acquired, 
the amount of time and labor that has been 
expended in acquiring them is really a second- 
ary matter. Any farm boy who has been well 
born, — by well born I mean has come of good, 
honest, respectable parents, whether they have 
much of this world's goods or little, — who has 
fairly good health and such an education as a 
common school gives, can acquire them if he 
will ; and if he does not, he has no one to blame 
but himself. He must, however, bend every 
energy to its requisition. He should not think 
too much about the girls until he has made a 
start. The good girls, and there are plenty of 
them coming on all the time, will keep. He 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS START IN LIFE 69 

must avoid acquiring expensive habits, and 
must diligently school himself to hard work, 
clear thinking, and honest living. 

In every department of life, whether manu- 
facturing, merchandising, or railroading, the 
captains of industry are looking for boys who 
have that kind of a start. If you go into any 
city, large or small, in this broad land, you will 
find that the men who are running things had 
that kind of a start, and got it themselves. 
Boys who have that kind of a start do not need 
to do much advertising. 

True manhood has a ring to it which all 
worthy men recognize, and that ring cannot 
be counterfeited successfully. There are few 
places where a start of that kind can be 
obtained as well as on the farm. Having 
secured the money part of the start, the farm 
boy can spend it in obtaining an education in 
college, or in the particular branch of business, 
or the particular profession, which he chooses to 
follow; and, barring sickness, accident, or an 
unwise marriage, nothing can prevent him from 
making a success in life. He may not become 
a millionnaire. A few, but only a few, really 
honest men do. He may not rise to a high 
political position, and yet he may ; for after all, 



70 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

honesty is the best politics, although few profes- 
sional politicians seem to think so. He will, 
however, secure the confidence of all who have 
to do with him, and all of this world's goods 
that he really needs, and more too. When 
time pushes him out of the world, as it does all 
of us, he will leave the world a good deal better 
than he found it, which, after all, is the highest 
measure of success. 

This is the kind of a man I wish you to 
become. It is in your power, when you start 
out resolutely, to make this start. If you do 
not make it, you will regret, in after years, that 
you did not take the advice of your Uncle 
Henry. 



CHAPTER X 
the faem boy and his habits 

My dear Boy: 

When you and I were quite small we had 
great difficulty in learning to walk. We first 
crept, then with great effort we learned to stand 
alone by a chair, then to take a single step, then 
two or three in succession. Our mothers en- 
couraged us to make larger ventures, and by and 
by we learned to walk across the floor, falling 
down, perhaps, two or three times; and when 
we succeeded, we felt that it was the proudest 
day of our lives. Every step at the beginning 
required a distinct effort of the will, of which 
we were then conscious, but it was not long 
until we walked without conscious thought or 
will. In other words, it walked itself. We 
had acquired the habit of walking. 

It took us a long time and much conscious 
effort to learn to talk. First, we mastered the 
easy words of one or two syllables, then of three, 
and by and by, with much toil and pains, we 

71 



72 LETTERS TO THE FABM BOY 

mastered the big words, and the w's, the v's, and 
the h's. We were quite proud of ourselves, 
and our parents were still prouder, when we 
learned to talk, or, rather, when it learned to 
talk itself. For some years afterward they were 
wont to complain that we talked entirely too 
much. We had formed the habit of talking. 

It took you and me a long time to learn to 
read. We had to learn first the name of one let- 
ter, then of another, with their appropriate 
sounds, and then to combine the letters and 
sounds, so that we did well when we could 
make out one word at a time. We formed 
the habit of doing this, and now we can read 
faster than we can make the sounds. Some 
people have learned, not merely to take in a 
word at a time, but a sentence ; and can skim 
over the pages of a book, and get the sense of 
it, in a way that those who have not learned to 
do so can scarcely understand. At least, I can- 
not. They have formed the habit. 

When you were in my office last, you noticed 
how very rapidly the stenographer handled the 
keys of the machine. It would be slow work 
for you and me, but if we had formed the habit, 
it would do itself. It was slow work for the 
stenographer to learn to take down talk in short- 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS HABITS 73 

hand, but it became so easy for a man I once 
employed that it required no thought at all; 
and on a hot day he would go to sleep taking it 
down, and I used to have to waken him. He 
had formed the habit. 

For several months of my life I had to take 
down speeches and lectures in longhand, and I 
got into the habit of leaving out nearly all the 
vowels in writing, and part of the consonants. 
Since then I have written a hand that few can 
read. I get to thinking, and the pen wriggles 
— that is all ; and often I cannot read it myself, 
unless I know what I am writing about, and 
thus I acquired a very bad habit. 

I have given you these illustrations of the 
powder and force of habit for a distinct purpose, 
You and I are simply bundles of habits. Every 
time we do anything it becomes easier to do it 
in the future, until by and by the doing of it 
becomes unconscious, automatic — it does itself. 
It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that 
we form correct habits in doing, in thinking, in 
living. If we learn to do a thing badly and form 
the habit, we will in all probability do it badly 
all our days. If we form the habit of doing 
things in the wrong way, or if we form the 
habit of doing evil things, we will in time 



74 LETTEKS XO THE FARM. BOI 

become careless men or bad men; for badness 
and goodness are, to a certain extent, at least, 
matters of habit. 

When your Uncle Henry was a boy, he was 
very anxious to get through with a great deal 
of work. For instance, he was anxious to be 
the fastest corn husker and the fastest grain 
binder in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, he 
formed the habit of binding sheaves loosely, 
and failed to acquire the habit of getting 
all the silk and husks off the corn. The mice 
had a picnic in the corn that he husked. A 
loose sheaf when hauled in, in harvest, or pitched 
out at threshing time, was instantly recognized 
as one of " Henry's sheaves." I tried hard to 
correct this habit in after years, but never suc- 
ceeded. I could bind tight enough as long as I 
kept thinking about it; but the moment I began 
thinking about something else, and that was 
about all the time, the sheaf bound itself loose. 

You will avoid a great deal of trouble in after 
life if you will acquire the habit of doing well 
whatever you do. It is no more trouble to 
acquire the habit of doing it right than wrong, 
and when a habit is once formed, it stays 
formed. The longer you practise it, the more 
firmly the habit becomes fixed. It is as easy to 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS HABITS 75 

I 

curry the horse well, when you get in the habit 
of it, as it is to give him a "lick and a promise." 
It is as easy to milk the cow clean, and with 
neatness and despatch, as it is to milk her other- 
wise. The habit, once formed, of doing things 
right, will stay with you as a perpetual heritage 
and blessing. The habit of doing things right 
can be formed by the conscious and conscien- 
tious right doing of them in the first place, and 
every subsequent repetition of the act fixes and 
confirms the habit until it becomes the perma- 
nent, though unconscious, habit of life. The 
man who learns to do the work on the farm 
right, will be very likely to do all his work 
right, for the reason that it becomes his second 
nature. 

I need not say to you that you are very fool- 
ish if you acquire what are ordinarily called bad 
habits, which are usually regarded as habits of 
doing wrong or useless things, and not the habit 
of doing right and useful things in the wrong 
way. A boy is foolish to acquire habits which 
involve expense or injury to his health, or waste 
his time and money. There are weights enough 
to be borne in life without taking on extra loads 
and binding them to our backs by the silken, 
yet generally unbreakable, cords of habit. 



76 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

Mental and moral habits are even more im- 
portant than physical. You will be greatly 
helped in forming right moral habits, and con- 
tinuing therein, if your father and mother have 
in your earliest childhood thoroughly instructed 
you in the first principles of right and wrong ; 
have taught you to do right because it is eter- 
nally right, and taught you to avoid doing 
wrong because it is everlastingly wrong; and 
that while there may be palliation of the guilt 
of wrong-doing, there can never, under any cir- 
cumstances, be a good excuse for it. If you are 
fortunate enough to have this kind of early 
teaching, and take to it kindly, it will be com- 
paratively easy to form right mental habits. 

You will be much more likely to incarnate 
these elementary principles of righteousness if 
you have righteous blood behind you, and much 
less likely if you have bad blood coursing 
through your veins. For, though some affect 
not to believe it, it is a truth as old as Moses, 
and in fact very much older, that the iniquities 
of the fathers (and mothers, too) are visited 
upon the children to the third and fourth gen- 
eration of them that hate the Lord, and mercy 
shown to thousands (generations) of "them 
that love Him and keep His commandments." 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS HABITS 77 

Some good people do not like this text be- 
cause they do not understand it. It is to me of 
great interest to know that in three or four gen- 
erations inherited evil may be overcome by the 
right kind of training, and that when overcome, 
a righteous character may be perpetuated, under 
the right kind of training, for an indefinite 
period. 

You will readily understand, therefore, that 
the formation of mental and moral habits is 
about the most important thing in your life. 
For example, you may form the habit of seeing 
things clearly and distinctly, and stating them 
truthfully ; or you may form the habit of half 
seeing, and stating them loosely. Do you know 
that as a matter of fact there are comparatively 
few persons who can tell the truth, that is, state 
things precisely as they are ? They are not con- 
scious liars, nor liars at all, in the obnoxious 
sense of that word, but nevertheless we cannot 
depend upon what they say, because we know 
they are not in the habit of seeing things as 
they are, or of stating in exact language what 
they see. There is no habit of more value to a 
young man, whether on the farm or off it, than 
to be able to discern truth, fact, reality, and to 
state it as he sees it, without exaggeration or 



78 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

being influenced by his hopes, his fears-, his dis- 
likes, or his prejudices. The farm boy has a 
better chance to practise in this line than any 
other class of boys. He should train himself to 
know by observation the weight of the steer or 
calf, the size of the field, the distance from one 
point to another, the yield per acre of the crops 
grown, and the color and form of every particu- 
lar animal on the farm. The good shepherd, by 
his close powers of observation, can tell each 
particular sheep even if there are five hundred 
in the flock, and detect at a glance over the flock 
which one is missing. The farm boy can do the 
same if he will. 

Next to the habit of seeing things as they 
are, is that of stating them exactly as they are, 
or that of telling the truth, a habit that can be 
acquired only by careful and long-continued 
practice, and which, when once acquired, will 
do more to win the confidence of men than 
almost any other one trait of character. 

Still more important, if anything, is the culti- 
vation of the habit of right doing. It is almost 
as easy to do right as wrong, if one but acquires 
the habit. Habits of right feeling precede 
habits of right doing. The thoroughly good 
man does right without thinking about it, or 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS HABITS 79 

talking about it, or taking to himself any credit 
for it whatever, because he has formed the 
habit of doing right. It becomes part of his 
nature. It would hurt him to do anything else, 
because it is the breaking up of the habit of his 
life,— a sort of rupture of the fibres of his being. 
If you will think a moment, you will see that 
it would not be possible for this world to run at 
all smoothly in any other way than by making 
men bundles of habits, thus giving permanency 
to character. You know that your father will 
be about the same sort of a man to-morrow, 
next week, or next year, that he was yesterday, 
or last week, or last year; that there will be 
little or no change in his walk, in his talk, in 
his modes of thinking and manner of meeting 
whatever problems come up on the farm. He 
will be out of humor with the same sort of 
things, and be pleased with the same sort. He 
will like the same sort of people he has liked 
for years, and will dislike the other sort. It is 
the same with your mother, and with all your 
neighbors. Business men, politicians, preachers, 
and teachers, all who have to do with men, 
count, in all their work, on this general per- 
manency of character, the result of fixed habits, 
based on fixed principles. If it were otherwise, 



80 LETTEBS TO THE FAKM BOY 

it would be impossible for us to do business, or 
to get along at all comfortably with each other. 
Society, politics, church affairs, and everything 
else would be in confusion. Getting acquainted 
with men is simply taking stock of their habits. 
We are always greatly surprised when some 
friend develops a trait of character which we 
never suspected, because we had not yet become 
acquainted with all the habits in the bundle. 
It is clearly of the utmost importance that you 
form the right sort of habits, and do it when 
you can do it easily. The older you become, 
the harder it will be to form good and to break 
up bad habits. 

You are yet young. You can form the habit 
of doing that which your own conscience tells 
yon is the right thing to do ; that for which 
there is no necessity of making any excuse ; of 
which your mother and father approve, of which 
your own sense of right approves, and of which 
the Ruler of this world must approve. It is 
not as easy to do this as to do the other thing, 
for there is more or less weakness and inherent 
wickedness in the best of men ; but the constant 
doing of it will so fix the habit that when you 
go out to take your place in the world, you will 
never seriously think of doing anything else, 



THE FARM BOY AND HIS HABITS 81 

nor will the world expect anything else of you. 
It is in this way that men become strong and 
form characters on which the weak will lean 
for guidance and direction. If you are in doubt 
about the propriety of doing anything, do not 
do it. " He that doubteth is damned ; " that is, 
condemned, or reproved, by his own sense of 
right or his conscience. 

You will see, my dear boy, that I have not 
given you a lecture, nor preached a sermon, but 
simply pointed out certain facts that you should 
know. It is not a question as to whether you 
will form habits or not. Form habits you will ; 
you cannot help that. It is simply a question 
whether you will form right habits or wrong 
ones ; which means, whether you will be a man 
that "will do to tie to," or not; whether, in 
short, this life, the only one you have to live 
in this world, is to be a success or a failure. 



CHAPTER XI 
the farm boy from home 

My dear Boy: 

I do not wonder that you sometimes become 
restless and want to get away from the farm for 
a day or two. I, too, felt that way. From the 
beginning of spring wheat sowing to the end of 
corn husking is a long time for a boy to work 
hard, day and night, with no vacation except 
the Fourth of July. 

Time flies after a man has passed fifty, but 
it limps along very slowly with a boy under 
twenty. Work on the farm, although much 
easier than it was when I w r as a boy, is not 
after all the very easiest kind of work, and if 
continued right along without interruption, 
becomes very monotonous. The hours of work 
are long in the summer, the nights short. We 
get tired looking, day after day, and month 
after month, at the same horizon, which seems 
to close down on us and shut us in all around, 
knowing all the while that there is a great 

82 



THE FARM BOY FROM HOME 83 

world beyond, throbbing and palpitating with 
human hopes and ambitions. We long to see 
something of it and share in its abundant life. 
At least I did. I know you do. 

Valuable as is the drill of farm work in form- 
ing habits of steady, persistent industry, the 
boy needs once in a while to get away from 
home, to see something of what the papers tell 
about, and to measure himself with other boys, 
and be measured by them. If a bright boy, he 
is apt, if kept always at home, to become a con- 
ceited fellow with vast conceptions of his abili- 
ties in one direction or another, and, if he is to 
be of any account in the world, needs to have 
this conceit completely knocked out of him. 
The farm boy who is first in the common school 
is very likely to get what, in common parlance, 
we expressively term "the big head," and he 
should have a chance to meet some one who has 
forgotten more than he ever new. The neigh- 
borhood bully should be encouraged to meet 
some one who will take the swagger and inso- 
lence out of him with one swift blow, coming 
like a clap of thunder out of a clear sk}^. The 
boy who has fallen into careless habits of speech 
or behavior should have a chance to see how 
well-bred boys conduct themselves, while the 



84 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

modest and diffident boy should have a chance 
to learn that an honest heart and a clear head, 
with country manners, are like gold — current 
the world over at full weight, with or without 
polish. 

The behavior of the farm boy away from 
home furnishes an excellent means of judging 
what sort of a boy he is, what sort of folks his 
parents are, and in what kind of a neighbor- 
hood he was brought up, or, at least, the kind 
of associates he has. When I see a number of 
farm boys going home from the state fair, or 
any other public gathering, noisy, profane, and 
evidently aiming to attract public attention, I 
am not surprised if I notice a bottle of liquor 
circulating among them, and I infer that they 
have seen but little of the world and that little 
not by any means the best part of it. I expect, 
of course, that when a farm boy goes away 
from home he will be somewhat like a colt that 
has been kept long in the stable and needs exer- 
cise. I expect him to have a good time and to 
enjoy himself ; but I also know that, now that 
he is off his guard, I can form a good deal bet- 
ter judgment of what he is, and what he is 
likely to be, than if I met him on the farm, and 
under the parental eye. 



THE FARM BOY FROM HOME 85 

I like the boy that likes fun. I like it my- 
self, and better in my old days than when I was 
young ; but there is no real fun in any behavior 
that is loud; that has neither wit nor humor in 
it, but more or less of obscenity or profanity. 
I like to see farm boys, when away from home, 
take an interest in base-ball and foot-ball and 
take part in these games, if they are strong 
enough to do it without danger to themselves. 
Such fun is natural, and as healthy as it is for 
colts to run, or for lambs to play. A boy who 
is fair in games will likely be fair in business ; 
and conversely. I have always suspected the 
genuineness of the Christianity of a certain 
preacher who once tried to cheat me in playing 
croquet. The boy who, when away from home, 
wants to see the seamy side of the city, or to 
" paint the town red," or to have what he calls 
"a high old time," serves notice on all men that 
he has poor stuff in him, and is likely to make a 
poor use of it. 

Other farm boys when away from home reveal 
the fact that they are insufferably vain and con- 
ceited, and need to be taken down a peg or two, 
and that severely. These are not usually bad 
boys. They simply overestimate their good 
looks, or their smartness, or, perhaps, their fath- 



86 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

er's wealth or social position. Living in the 
narrow circle of the neighborhood, they get 
an enormously exaggerated idea of their own 
importance, and make themselves the laughing 
stock of sensible people. If they have sense 
enough to see this and get down from their 
pedestal, they will come out all right. It is 
often an excellent thing for a boy to get away 
from home and be laughed at and ridiculed, and 
made to feel himself cheap and mean. The 
medicine is hard to take, but it is good for you. 
You will not get it unless you need it. The 
next time you get away you will not dress nor 
act so as to attract attention. You will slip 
along quietly like the rest of us common folks, 
and will, as a result, get the good-will of the 
plain, common-sense sort of people who are 
really the only sort that can be of any real help 
to you. 

Let me give you a hint : Whether away from 
home or at home, dress and act so that you will 
attract as little notice as possible. Leave off 
that glaring necktie, and the hat that is either 
too broad or too narrow in the rim. Do not 
push yourself into public notice, and do not 
hide away. Face the world boldly but modestly; 
do not force your own opinions upon people, 



THE FARM BOY FROM HOME 87 

and do not hesitate to express them modestly, but 
firmly, when called upon, and the outside world 
will henceforth consider you a boy of good sense, 
and the making of a strong man. 

A good many farm boys are entirely too mod- 
est and diffident when away from home, and 
particularly so if they are thrown among noted 
men, or men and women who have seen much 
of the world. They then become painfully self- 
conscious. Their dress does not seem to fit as 
they thought it did when they left home. They 
lose their natural manner and become stiff and 
awkward, especially when in the society of re- 
fined and cultivated ladies. They are at a 
loss as to what to do with their hands and 
feet. This is a very painful experience. Do 
not fret because you step high while other men 
seem to glide along. You are accustomed to 
walking over rough surfaces ; they over carpets. 
Do not feel bad because you speak loud. You 
have to speak loud out of doors on the farm ; 
they speak to people in the house and naturally 
in low tones. The sensible man understands 
all this and thinks none the less of the boy for 
acting naturally and farmerlike. 

Do you know that business men of all sorts 
are constantly looking out for just this sort of 



88 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

boys ? They always suspect the farm boy who, 
when away from home, tries to ape the manners 
of the town boy, or who shows traces of foppery. 
In the eyes of sensible men in the city, country 
manners are always at a premium. You may 
not know, but I do, that successful men every- 
where like well-bred, modest boys, and will 
always encourage and push them to the front as 
far and as fast as it is safe. Most of them were 
farm boys themselves, remember their own early 
trials, and take genuine pleasure in giving a 
helping hand to these young fellows who come 
to the city to push their fortunes, or who push 
them on the farm. 

I can point out middle-aged bankers who will 
loan money to a boy, when, if the father came, 
they would have " no money to lend " that day. 
They see clear through country manners to the 
real stuff underneath, and take pleasure in help- 
ing the farm boy with a clean life, resolute will, 
and unstained honor. There is one man now 
gone over to the other world, whose memory I 
revere. He invited me, with other boys, to take 
tea and spend the evening. His wife was city- 
bred, fashionable, and vain. I was fresh from 
the farm, awkward, and very plainly dressed. 
She lectured me on my lack of taste in dress and 



THE FARM BOY PROM HOME 89 

refinement in manner. He overheard it, and 
said : " Henry, you will find it much easier to 
put my wife's advice in practice if you stick 
close to your studies, get the foundation first, 
and be thorough in all your work. Your dress 
and manners will then come all right. Make 
yourself worth polishing, and the polish will 
come as you rub up against men." 

While self-conceit and self-assertion should 
be repressed in the farm boy, he should at the 
same time know the full value of his powers and 
learn to rely upon them. Getting away from 
home and mingling with the very best sort of 
people will teach you how to take your proper 
measure. Low-bred fellows, physical and intel- 
lectual bullies, and small souls who are con- 
stantly in fear lest some one surpasses them, 
will try to intimidate you by ridiculing, by 
browbeating or bulldozing you; but when you 
strike a true man, he will be your friend. 

It will do you no good to associate with snobs 
and upstarts. If you get a good, honest, manly, 
and intelligent face on you, which you can get 
only by being an honest, manly, and thoughtful 
farm boy, you do not need any certificate of 
character or letter of recommendation from 
anybody. You will find that the very highest 



90 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

people in the whole land are the most easily 
approached, and the most ready and willing to 
help a modest, thoroughly upright, and self- 
reliant farm boy. I have the honor to be per- 
sonally acquainted with many of the great men 
of the nation, and I find that the greater the 
man, the easier it is to approach him. It was 
much easier to reach General Grant during the 
war than the petty officers who waited on him. 
President McKinley is a much more approach- 
able man than many of the little popinjays who 
want to be county officers or to be elected to 
the legislature. You would feel much easier in 
talking with the members of his cabinet than 
with many of the small men who hold clerkships 
in the various departments. 

Get away from home if you can, and when 
away mix with the very best people within your 
reach. Keep out of the noisy, boisterous crowd. 
Let the prigs admire their own excellences. 
Do not hesitate to mix with the best men much 
older than yourself. You need never be afraid 
or ill at ease with a really great man. If you 
are of the right sort to begin with, he will be 
glad to talk with you. If the best men con- 
stantly give you the cold shoulder, there must 
be something wrong with you. What is it ? 



CHAPTER XII 

about the hardup family 

My dear Boy: 

I fear I have given you more good advice in 
previous letters than you are likely to take. I 
suspect you have not read all of them very care- 
fully. You may have the idea that it is natural 
and right for a boy to have his fun, and per- 
haps sow a little wild oats, and have a good time 
generally until he is married, and then it will 
be time to settle down. Your father and mother 
have read these letters, and perhaps urged you 
to read them carefully. They may, indeed, 
have urged you a little more than was prudent. 
I find that nothing does a boy good unless he 
relishes it. Unless you have a taste for good 
advice, and take to it naturally, it will, very 
likely, be wasted. For this reason I propose 
hereafter to give you illustrations rather than 
advice, and will tell you something about farm 
boys who have failed, and failed for the reason 

91 



92 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

that they have not taken advice similar to that 
which I have given you. 

When a man has lived over sixty years, and 
been a close observer of farm boys, mingling with 
them all those years, he acquires a very large 
acquaintance, and can group his acquaintances 
into a great many classes. I propose to tell you 
in this letter about a very large and respectable 
class of farm boys under the general name of 
Hardup. 

The Hardups are a very old family; their 
pedigree traces back through the Revolutionary 
period, and quite a number of them came over 
in the Mayflower. In my trips abroad I find 
that they are a large family on the other side, 
and in looking up their pedigrees, I have found 
that they antedate the oldest names in the Eng- 
lish peerage, and in fact trace to that period "of 
which the memory of man runneth not back to 
the contrary." 

A large number of them came West before 
and after I did. I have kept my eye on a few, 
and have had many pleasant and profitable talks 
with them. Many of them are eminently re- 
spectable people, and some of them are among 
my warmest personal friends, of whom I may 
speak freely, provided I don't tell where they 
live. 



ABOUT THE HARDUP FAMILY 93 

For example, there is my friend, Ben Hardup, 
as good a fellow as ever lived, true to his friends, 
open-hearted, generous, loyal to his party, de- 
voted to his church, and true to his name, Hard- 
up. I knew his father before him, his brothers 
and sisters, his cousins and his aunts, and they 
were all of a piece — " the easy-going Hardups," 
we used to call them. They were good livers. 
I shall never forget a remark that Ben's father 
made to me one time at supper, when I asked 
him how it was that he was able to live so much 
better than many of his neighbors. He was carv- 
ing a fat turkey at the time, and he stopped, 
looked at me with mock severity, and said, 
" Henry, I want you to understand that neither 
I nor any of my boys will ever die in debt to his 
stomach." That particular branch of the fam- 
ily, at least, never did, wherever I have known 
them. 

I warned Ben when he came West not to set- 
tle in the timber, as I have warned you not to do 
certain things. He did the precise thing which 
I warned him not to do. I hope you will not 
follow his example. It was a very natural mis- 
take that Ben made. He said to himself, as he 
told me the other dajr when I spent a pleasant 
evening with him, that the way he looked at it 



94 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

was this : The prairie lands of this great state 
would never be settled up. Just as he left the 
East he dreamed that, in moving West, when he 
came to the top of a hill, the left back wheel of 
his wagon came off, and before him there lay a 
beautiful stream with timber growing along its 
banks, a log cabin and a fertile prairie for miles 
on each side. The dream was fulfilled during 
his journey. There lay the landscape he had 
seen in his vision. When he had repaired his 
wagon, he called to the owner of the cabin and 
bought that quarter section. 

He was one hundred and fifty miles from a 
railroad. He said to himself: "Here is tim- 
ber, shelter, good land, and pasture that would 
have made Jacob weep if Esau had squatted on 
it. What more do I want?" In less than five 
years from that time the railroad came, and 
with it settlers jumping over each other to 
enter land. He was shut up to his timber land, 
which he has been grubbing out ever since. " I 
do not mind," said he, " the hard work it has 
cost me and my boys to prepare fields, although 
had I gone out a few miles, I could have 
had much better lands at government price, 
in which I could have ploughed the length and 
breadth of a quarter without striking a stone 



ABOUT THE HARDUP FAMILY 95 

or a stump. But there are a lot of folks settled 
along this timber, with some of whom I do not 
care to have my boys and girls associate, and I 
must get out of this as soon as possible if I am 
to have a happy and peaceful old age." 

His brother Sam went out on the prairie and 
Ben furnished him firewood free for five years. 
He built a temporary house, and prairie stable, 
broke up his land by piecemeal, and finally got 
it all under cultivation. Along early in the 
sixties he had the misfortune to have a great 
wheat crop and sell it at a long price. This 
awakened his dormant ambition. He thought 
he must have more land, and bought an adja- 
cent quarter, giving a mortgage on both. The 
next year the wheat crop failed and the bottom 
fell out of prices. Bob Cheatem, the son of a 
broker of the firm of Ketchem and Cheatem, 
whose acquaintance Sam made in coming West, 
and who had a large flock of diseased sheep on 
his hands (taken in on a mortgage), called to 
revive old acquaintance, and incidentally per- 
suaded him to go into sheep. Sam knew noth- 
ing about sheep, but yielded to Bob's persuasive 
eloquence, which he describes as follows : " You 
see, Sam, wool is worth a dollar a pound, and 
every ewe will shear eight pounds each year, 



96 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

and give you two good lambs. The lambs are 
worth five dollars apiece, and there is eighteen 
dollars for keeping one sheep a year, and you 
can keep six of them on an acre." Sam bought 
the sheep and millions of scab mites with them, 
and foot rot to boot ; and in less than a year he 
sold all that remained of his flock for a dollar a 
head, and was glad to get rid of them at that. 
Bob had a second mortgage on the farm, and a 
chattel mortgage on everything not exempt by 
law from execution. Poor Sam has been work- 
ing from that day to this, year in and year out, 
to get rid of that mortgage given for Bob's 
sheep. 

The trouble with Sam was that life had been 
too easy with him in boyhood, and a little pros- 
perity made him dizzy, as it has made many 
another man. He had never really studied 
farming, and when misfortune came, he grasped, 
like a drowning man, at a straw, was easily the 
dupe of a designing scoundrel, and went into a 
department of farming of which he had no 
knowledge whatever. 

I count his boys more fortunate than he. 
They are experiencing misfortune when they 
are young; but if they have grit enough not 
to be disgusted with farming, and sense enough 



ABOUT THE HARDUP FAMILY 97 

to look round and see that other farmers pros- 
per who follow right lines, they may one day 
make the name of Hardup a misnomer in that 
neighborhood. 

Their brother Jim was a fortunate fellow. 
He married a bright, snappy little wife, with 
eyes that could blaze like coals of fire, or make 
a fellow's heart go pitty-pat when she looked 
at him lovingly (I used to see her home from 
singing school occasionally), and she took Jim 
in hand, and made him, as they say, toe the 
mark. I knew she would do it. There was no 
sleeping until after sunrise in that house. Jim 
worked and she managed, and it is a joke in 
the neighborhood, that when a man wants a 
little monejr, he is directed to go to Jim 
Hardup. Whatever mistakes the rest made, 
Jim made none when he married. Had he 
married one of the clinging-ivy sort that say, 
" Not as I will, but as you please," Jim would 
have been as hard up as any of the Hardups, 
and his boys would have lacked the grit and 
snap that make their name a standing joke. 
Ben's boys and Sam's are renters; some of 
them hired hands. Jim's boys own their own 
farms. Moral: If you are ever inclined to be 
easy-going, do not be afraid to cultivate the 



98 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

acquaintance of the girl that has more get-up 
and snap than you have ; it may be the life of 
you, my boy, and I think it will. 

The Hardups, however, do not all live in the 
country. I know plenty of them in town. 
Some are chronically hard up because they 
have made mistakes in the past and cannot help 
it. I pity them, as I do every man that has 
been unfortunate — whether through his own 
fault or not. Some are financially hard up for 
the time being, because of sickness or other 
misfortune. Some, because they have been too 
honest, and scorned to take an advantage that 
might have made them rich — for the time. 
Others, because they have had too much faith 
in human nature, and have been the victims of 
scoundrels like Bob Cheatem, who live by 
studying the weak points of their fellow-beings, 
winning their confidence, and robbing them 
under the forms of law. Many a fine house 
stands on a corner lot on a fashionable street 
in the city, built with money which was never 
earned by the owner, but stolen under forms of 
law from the men who earned it; and these 
men now, if properly named, would be called 
" Hardup." 

I shall never forget the look ,t.h$t came on 



ABOUT THE HARDUP FAMILY 99 

Sam Hardup's face, when, in passing through 
his county seat we came to Bob Cheatem's 
broker office, miscalled "bank," and saw his 
fine horses and carriage, with the liveried 
coachman, standing by the curbstone. He 
stopped and, pointing with quivering finger, 
said: "There is the scoundrel that has made me 
and mine poor. May 'his wife be a widow, 
and his children fatherless.' ' I was about to 
rebuke him when it occurred to me that he was 
quoting from one of David's psalms. As we 
passed on he said : " Henry, you will have to 
excuse me this time, but nothing but the so- 
called ' cursing psalms ' meets that man's case ; 
and I think it was to describe just such scoun- 
drels as he that they were written. He owned 
those scabby sheep, and in pretending to give 
good advice to a friend in trouble, made him 
poor for life. 'Let his iniquity return upon 
his own head.' " 

And I said, "Amen." 



L-ira 



CHAPTER XIII 

about the richman family 

My dear Boy: 

I told you in my last letter about some of the 
misfortunes which befell various typical mem- 
bers of the Hardup family. Whether they are 
true to type or not, you can very easily find out 
by observing various members of that interesting 
family within the range of even your limited 
acquaintance. You may possibly be interested 
in some mistakes that have been made by 
various typical members of another family 
equally ancient and honorable — the Richmans. 
The Richmans are not nearly so numerous as 
the Hardups. For some reason there are com- 
paratively few of them. Mr. Lincoln used to 
say that the Lord must like the Hardups best, or 
he would not have made so many of them. For 
some reason the Richmans have, usually, small 
families ; and the more exclusive and aristocratic 
they become, the fewer children they seem to 
have. 

100 



ABOtJT THE RICHMAN FAMILY 101 

They are a very old family. We read in 
Bible times of one Solomon Richman. If he 
had not had plenty of money, I suppose he 
would have gone by the name of " Sol." He 
knew a lot more than any man of the family 
that I ever heard of. He was regarded as the 
wisest man of that day ; and yet in his old days, 
in looking back over his past, he seemed to put 
very little store on his money, saying in effect, 
that the piling up of money was vanity and vex- 
ation of spirit, for the reason that no man could 
tell whether his boy would be a wise man or a 
fool, — or words to that effect ; that the man 
who gave himself up solely to piling up money 
never knew who was going to spend it, and that 
the very best thing a boy or man could do was 
to fear God and keep His commandments. In 
this opinion I concur. Solomon did a great 
many foolish things, but, taking all in all, I 
regard him as the smartest specimen of the 
Richman family I ever heard of, and I advise 
you to read his book on the conduct of life, gen- 
erally known as the book of " Proverbs." 

I was reading only last night of a member of 
the family who died a few days ago in England. 
He began life poor, was the son of a coal miner, 
and had scarcely enough to live on the first 



102 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

years of his life. He went to school at night, 
lost his father in early youth, but became one of 
the greatest men England ever produced, dying 
at the ripe old age of ninety-two, and as cheerful 
in his last days as a boy of twenty. 

While this family numbers some of the very 
best people the world has ever known, it num- 
bers a lot of very great scoundrels. There 
seems to be something wrong with the breed. 
They are not like the Hardups, an even lot ; and 
it is somewhat notorious that their boys seldom 
turn out as well as those of the Hardups, and 
their girls are very liable to make poor matches. 
I suppose this is why they are such an uneven 
lot. 

One of my earliest friends was Colonel Alex- 
ander Richman. He was a farmer, and got his 
title, not by service in the army, but as colonel 
of the militia. He was a very good farmer, 
indeed, one of the best I have ever known, and 
being a good business man as well as farmer, 
reading the agricultural papers of that day 
very closely, watching the markets, and keep- 
ing his credit away above par, he made a lot of 
money. He branched out into matters outside 
the farm, and for many years made money 
hand over fist without oppressing anybody, or 



ABOUT THE RlCHMAN FAMILY 103 

taking a mean advantage. His word was as 
good as a government bond. When his boys 
got hold, backed as they were by their father's 
unlimited credit, the business spread out, so to 
speak, over all creation, with the result that in 
a few years the entire credit of the family was 
no greater than that of the poorest Hardup in 
the neighborhood, and their cash not much 
greater in amount. 

I knew his brother John well. He was a 
well-to-do farmer, had two hundred acres of 
land of the best sort, with the best of improve- 
ments, a fine brick house, large and commodi- 
ous barns, a great orchard, every field fenced 
hog-tight, and everything else to match. He 
had an only son named Robert. His mother 
died when he was a baby, and he was brought 
up by two maiden aunts, in whose eyes nothing 
was too good for Robert. He slept late in the 
morning, had an elegant pony to ride, fine 
clothes, and all that. None of the neighbors' 
girls were good enough for him, and he mar- 
ried a lady of reputed wealth a long way from 
home, who knew nothing of farm life, and he 
had to keep two girls to wait on her. When 
the new wife came the aunts paid dearly for 
their indulgence of Robert, and left, calling 



104 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

him an ungrateful wretch. In a few years a 
young Hardup, who was getting on in the 
world, took in by sheriff's deed the last forty 
of Robert's magnificent inheritance. Robert 
moved to town and died a wreck. 

A distant relative of this same family moved 
West. His mother, so the tradition among the 
old folks goes, had a fancy for odd names, and 
she called him Graybel. He was known among 
the boj^s as " Grabe " and rather well liked. 
He had none of the aristocratic airs that charac- 
terized the other members of the family. In 
fact, he became quite popular in school. His 
father was one of the best of the connection, 
and, in trying to uphold their credit with his 
own, failed, and young Graybel moved West, 
starting in the world poor. He worked late 
and early, never went in debt, lived poorly, 
and married a thoroughly good, quiet sort of 
a wife, of whom he, as well as his children, 
subsequently made a slave. When he had a 
little money ahead through working, scraping, 
and saving, he loaned it to his neighbors at 
anywhere from two to five per cent a month, 
a thing not unusual in those early days, and 
took cutthroat chattel mortgages, iron-bound, 
copper-bottomed, and warranted to hold any- 



ABOUT THE RICHMAN FAMILY 105 

thing except a man's life in his body. As his 
wealth increased he loaned to his neighbors 
who owned real estate but were a little behind- 
hand, on the same sort of ironclad mortgages, 
making all payments due and payable on de- 
fault of the principal or interest of any pay- 
ment, and foreclosed on the first opportunity. 
He became wealthy rapidly* The love of 
money took complete possession of his entire 
being. The demon of avarice took an ironclad 
mortgage on the entire family, except his 
patient and long-suffering wife, who was chari- 
table to the extent to which she could carry on 
her benefactions in secret — a limited extent in 
that family. 

Father and sons worked together with one 
mind and purpose, drove hard bargains, bought 
stock, land, and grain at the very lowest prices 
which their owners were compelled by their 
hard necessities to accept, prying constantly 
into the business of their neighbors to see how 
soon, and to what extent, they could put on the 
screws. On week days they wore the coarsest 
clothes, and it was often remarked on the quiet 
that but one of the boys was ever seen at church 
at a time, — the old man never, — and that the 
same suit of clothes seemed to fit, equally well, 



106 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

all the men of the family. Finally the wife 
and mother died from sheer overwork and 
exposure. Her last remark was : " I am so 
tired — so t-i-r-e-d." 

In less than a year a second wife appeared on 
the scene. She did not linger long. She was 
smart, ambitious, fairly well educated, liked to 
dress in good taste but not extravagantly, had 
a temper of her own, and a tongue that could 
cut like a razor without even raising the tone 
of her voice. Long before this happened the 
neighbors had changed the name of Graybel to 
Grab All. There was some quiet talk in the 
neighborhood when Grab All Richman had his 
hair dyed, put down new carpets, got a good 
suit of clothes, and a fine new buggy; but 
before the hair clye had disappeared, and long 
before the carpets or buggy were worn out, 
there was a first-class sensation in the circuit 
court in the shape of a divorce suit, in which 
Grab All Richman was defendant and his wife 
plaintiff, and a decree for alimony which it 
required the sale of two good farms to satisfy. 
This broke the old man's heart, and he died in 
the winter. Before the grass grew in the spring 
on the sod which covered his grave, the sons 
were at swords' points over the division of the 



ABOUT THE RICHMAN FAMILY 107 

estate, and there was a public washing of soiled 
linen that disgusted the entire neighborhood. 

You will not live many years, nor become ac- 
quainted in very many neighborhoods, until you 
find families and individuals that approximate 
to this type of the Richman family. I hope you 
will not meet any which this description entirely 
fits. I draw the picture that you may learn how 
to shape your life so that its ending will not 
have the faintest likeness to that which I have 
drawn. 

The Richmans, however, do not all live in the 
country. Very few of them, in fact, do, the 
atmosphere of the city being much more con- 
genial to their aristocratic tastes, and city con- 
ditions much more favorable to the gratification 
of the chief ambition of most of them, that of 
making money, or rather of transferring money 
from the pockets of other people to their own. 
I was walking along one of the fashionable 
streets of one of the largest American cities 
recently with my friend Silas Richman, who, 
by the way, is a bit of a philosopher. He called 
my attention to a number of his relatives and 
connections who were driving along in the 
fashionable boulevard with their fine teams 
driven by liveried coachmen, and said : " Please 



108 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

note the lines of care and anxiety written on 
the faces of those men, and contrast them with 
the happy-go-lucky air of the people who are 
walking on this street. I have studied this 
matter closely for a number of years, and have 
always found that the fellows who bear heavy 
burdens ride in great style, while the men with 
light hearts, happy countenances, and free from 
care, and who have real enjoyment in life, walk. 
I used to train in that crowd. I made in twenty 
years over three-quarters of a million dollars. 
I have lost $725,000 of it, and my health besides, 
and I am just beginning to realize what a 
consummate fool I was, and what consummate 
fools are those relations of mine. In 1893 I had 
$830,000 good value. I knew I did not need 
any more, but I took the foolish notion into 
my head that I must be able to truthfully call 
myself a millionnaire. I made large investments 
and involved myself in debt in order to make 
that other $170,000 at one bold, Napoleonic 
stroke. I had paid insurance for twenty-five 
years, and never lost a cent by fire ; but just at 
the wrong time one building took fire on which 
I had foolishly allowed the insurance to lapse 
two weeks before, and it swept away $130,000, 
In a month another came and swept away 



ABOUT THE RIGHMAN FAMILY 109 

864,000 more. This shook my credit, and I was 
obliged to sell a large amount of property at a 
great sacrifice. I had built a residence costing 
me 890.000 ; had spent 821.000 in furnishing it : 
had fine teams and carriages, and thus starred 
out in great style. When one piece of misfor- 
tune after another came. I began to realize my 
folly, and figured that I could board myself and 
family in comfort for the taxes and interest I 
was paying on my establishment. I am glad 
to say to you now that the last year, when I 
have been living sensibly as a common sort of a 
man. has been the happiest year of my life. 

" I was no greater fool than the rest of them 
are yet. Look, for instance, at my cousin 
George. He was reputed worth 840.000.000. 
He died suddenly last week, a comparatively 
young man. When he is ; cut up/ that is. 
when his estate is divided, it will probably be 
found to be less than 810.000.000. His sons 
are drunkards, and unless he has cut them off, 
which I suspect he has. with a life annuity, his 
property will go to the dogs. 

••His brother Charles is reputed worth 
twenty millions, and is probably worth eight ; 
has been once in the penitentiary, and twice 
bankrupt. Each of these men has incidentally 



110 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

rendered great service to the public while get- 
ting rich, but they are hated and despised be- 
cause of their avarice and greed. Charles told 
me only last night that if he was as bad a man as 
people thought he was, he would drown himself 
before morning. The fact is that fate, perhaps 
you would call it Providence, makes out of their 
avarice, greed, and ambition, whips and goads 
to compel the Richmans to carry out great 
enterprises of which the public receives the 
benefit, and for which they get the curses. 
As for me, I am gathering up what is left 
of the wreck of my fortune, the result of my 
foolish ambition, and I propose to take what 
comfort I can in this world while I am left 
in it, and regain my health — if I can." 

I would not have you believe that all the 
Richmans are of the type that I have sketched. 
Many members of this family are among the 
best people I have ever known. The trouble 
with them is that they do not run evenly, and 
have not a clear, well-defined nigral type. If 
they were all good men, this world would be a 
great deal better world than it is. 

I like to see men make money, and plenty of 
it, but honestly. I like to see farmers, mer- 
chants, and all sorts and conditions of men, who 



ABOUT THE RICHMAN FAMILY 111 

follow honest callings and use honest means, 
get on in the world. Capital is essential to the 
proper conduct of the world's business, and, 
when handled by honest men, is one of the best 
friends the poor man has or can have. I hope 
you will be a rich man some day, even if your 
name is not Richman ; but I could not wish you 
a worse fate than will befall you if you set 
before yourself money, profit, wealth, as the 
end to be desired above all other things, and at 
the expense of honor, manliness, and character. 
When this passion for getting money in any 
way possible, but getting it, takes hold of a 
boy or man, it is sure death, by strangulation, 
to every noble purpose, and even every instinct 
that distinguishes man from the swine he feeds. 
It renders him false to his associates, — true 
friends he can have none, — cruel to his family 
and to his hired hands. He must of necessity 
be a harsh and cruel husband ; a father whom 
his sons and daughters may fear, but can never 
love as children should love their parents. 
Those whom he has wronged hate him ; those 
who know him best necessarily despise him ; 
and his memory, like that of the wicked, shall 
rot. 



CHAPTER XIV 
the hardman family 

My dear Boy: 

When I was a farm boy we had in our neigh- 
borhood a representative of the Hardman family. 
I supposed in my innocence that this was about 
all of that family or class there were in exist- 
ence. I have since learned, and so will you, 
that they are a large family, very widely scat- 
tered all over the world, and quite ancient, if 
not quite honorable. Even as a boy I noticed 
that one of the peculiarities of this family was 
that no one really liked them, or even pretended 
to like them, unless he had something to gain by 
it, or something to fear from them, if he failed 
to pretend to like them. 

I could never discover that old Jakie (no one 
ever called him Mister) Hardman had a true 
friend. I could never discern that his boys had 
any affection for him, and, judging from the way 
his daughters ran away with worthless scamps, I 

112 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 113 

took it that fear and not love ruled in that 
home. 

After I left home and met with other members 
of the Hardman tribe, I discovered several other 
peculiarities. One was in their choice of lines 
of business or profession. I never knew one of 
them to become a doctor, preacher, or professor 
in a college, seldom one a school teacher, and 
then for not more than one or two terms. I 
have known a few of them to become lawyers, 
but always in connection with some other line 
of business, such as note shaving, or real estate. 
I never knew as much as one of them to become 
an editor, but one or two were business managers 
of newspapers — for a time. I never knew one 
of them to be a candidate for congress, or the 
state legislature. I have known a number that 
were members of city councils, and quite a num- 
ber who were assessors in the city, but never one 
in the country. 

Another peculiar feature of the Hardmans is 
that they do not generally believe in any educa- 
tion beyond the three R's, — readin',' ritin', and 
'rithmetic. I have known among the hundreds 
that I have met a few that were fairly good 
farmers, but none that were fully up-to-date. 
As a rule they got rich and made more money 



114 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

than the up-to-date farmers, not, however, by 
farming, but by trading, and by loaning money 
at the very highest rate of interest, and on cut- 
throat mortgages. 

Perhaps the best way to give you an insight 
into the Hardman character is to tell you the 
story of Tom Hardman. He was not a bad boy, 
as I remember him, and had the sympathy of 
most of the boys, because we knew he had a hard 
time of it at home. He was worked hard; 
driven like a slave, in fact, from the time school 
closed in March, until the beginning of the win- 
ter term in December. He was, however, natu- 
rally bright, and picked up knowledge quite 
readily. He was a sharp trader even then, and 
the boy who swapped knives or caps with Tom 
Hardman always got the worst of it. The worst 
thing I knew about him in those days was his 
disposition to knuckle to the big boys when he 
ought to have resented their insults, and his 
tyranny over the small boys who had no big 
brothers to take their part, — two things which, 
in my observation, always go together in boy 
and man. He ran away from home at the age 
of fifteen, and, after I had made the acquaintance 
of large numbers of the Hardman family, I was 
all the more anxious to learn Tom's history. 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 115 

On my last trip abroad I noticed on the 
passenger list the name of Thomas Hardman, 
Esq., and was glad to learn, on introducing 
myself, that he was none other than my old 
schoolmate. An ocean steamer furnishes one 
of the best opportunities to study human nature 
and find out what men really think on all 
important subjects. Passengers are completely 
cut off from the outside world for a week or 
ten days. There are no letters, telegrams, no 
press of business, nothing whatever to do but 
to be seasick, eat, sleep, look out for whales 
and icebergs, and tell stories to kill time. 
There is more or less of an element of danger 
to the life, and this draws people closer to- 
gether and makes them willing to reveal their 
true character. Neither Tom nor I was sea- 
sick, and after we had traced out the history of 
each of the old boys and girls in detail, we 
began to unfold our own experiences. 

He was not free to talk about himself at 
first. I felt my way gradually by talking about 
matters of current history, such as the probable 
working of the Wilson bill then going into 
effect; then on partisan politics, literature, 
manufactures, and finally on agriculture. I 
told him of my own hopes and ambitions in the 



116 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

line of newspaper work; that my aim was to 
develop the agriculture of the nation, and 
especially of the West ; to aid in developing a 
class of farmers mightier than Caesar's legions, 
more invincible than Cromwell's Ironsides, the 
stay of the country in war, its balance-wheel in 
peace when other classes lose their heads ; and 
that I wished so to live and work that when I 
was dead and gone my name would be remem- 
bered by thousands as a man who had left the 
world better than he found it. 

He finally said to me on the last day of the 
voyage : " Henry, you have been a fool all your 
days. You had it in you to make money and 
plenty of it ; but you have chosen instead to 
run on a fool's errand by trying to help other 
people. I have heard of your doings from time 
to time. I know more about you than you 
think, and what I say to your face I have said 
dozens of times behind your back. You are a 
fool. I have no doubt you have helped many, 
or at least you think you have. You have also 
loaned money on poor security, and you have 
been too chicken-hearted to put the screws 
down hard and realize on what security you 
had. You have let women cry you out of forc- 
ing collections, and they have laughed at you 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 117 

behind your back. What do these people care 
for you or yours ? You have helped men into 
place and power, and they have kicked you ; 
you have given scoundrels your confidence, and 
they have betrayed it, and slandered and abused 
you in order to make themselves believe that 
they owed you nothing. 

" I have done nothing of the kind. You and 
I are as wide apart as the poles. You believe 
in a God; I do not. You believe there is a 
future ; I do not. You believe there is a right 
and wrong; I do not. You believe there is 
such a thing as sin ; I do not. If there is a sin, 
it is that of perpetuating the race in such a 
cursed world as this. You started out to look 
after other people and to teach them how to fit 
themselves for another world ; I started out to 
look after number one, which means me, myself, 
and I have done it. 

" I ran away from home, as you know. Why 
I did it you know. My father never loved me, 
and I never loved him. There was no love 
between my father and mother, brothers and 
sisters. Love of every kind is a fool's dream ; 
modesty is hypocrisy ; humility is cowardice. 
I hired out to a farmer out West at two hun- 
dred dollars a year and board. I drew enough 



118 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

to live on, never over fifty dollars a year, and 
often much less, and I took his note at ten per 
cent per annum for the rest, and always 
reloaned him the interest. I did this for ten 
years. The tenth year he had hard luck. His 
crops failed, his hogs died of cholera, and his 
cows aborted. Times were hard, neither the 
banks nor loan companies w r ere advancing money, 
and I foreclosed and took the farm subject to a 
mortgage of $2000, which cut out the home- 
stead rights and his wife's dower. I farmed, 
and he hired out. 

"My credit was now established. I could 
after that borrow when, and as much as, I 
wanted to. I quit work, rented the farm for 
cash rent with an ironclad lease, and collected 
every cent, although it took all the fool fellow 
had and left the judgment still unsatisfied, 
which made him my slave for a year or two 
more. I looked out for lame ducks, took them 
in, and made money hand over fist. 

" I soon got tired of skinning grangers. They 
squeal when they are skinned, and so do their 
neighbors. They have a lot of old fogy 
notions in the country. They think the Ten 
Commandments are binding, and that Christ 
talked business in his Sermon on the Mount. 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 119 

At thirty-five I was worth §20,000. I shook 
the dust of the country from my feet and came 
to the city. I came in on the Wabash. The 
train was detained by wrecks — a freight wreck 
in front, one behind, and one on a branch line, 
and we had to wait half a day. I fell in with 
the master mechanic of the shops in the city, 
and we got to talking about Jay Gould's manage- 
ment of his railroads. He told me that Gould 
managed to borrow or in some way get hold of 
proxies for enough stock to elect him president, 
and he then in various ways decreased the rev- 
enues by large salaries, by improvements, by 
diverting traffic to other roads, until he ran 
the stock away down, and bought in as much as 
possible. Shrewd men were afraid to own 
stock in anything that Jay Gould controlled, 
and he took advantage of his own rascality. 
When he got a large amount of the stock in his 
hands and secured full control, he began build- 
ing up the road by reversing his methods, and 
sold out to suckers. He thus milked the pub- 
lic into his own bucket. 

" I said to myself, Why cannot I do this on a 
small scale ? The first thing I did was to find 
a corporation lawyer after my own heart, and 
agree to give him a slice on the sly. He was 



120 LETTERS TO THE FARM BO¥ 

well acquainted in the city. We looked out 
for a prosperous corporation and found one 
stockholder who would sell enough stock to 
give me a controlling interest by voting with 
one faction or the other. I then made my deal 
for directors with the side that had the least 
conscience. When we got control we put up 
salaries, wiped out the surplus, made no divi- 
dends, and rendered the stock worthless to 
the minority. If suits were brought, my legal 
friend, whom I employed to tell me, not 
what the law was, but how I could evade it, 
demurred, delayed, postponed, and worried the 
other side until they sold me their stock for a 
song. 

" I soon found that I could swipe in a hundred 
dollars in the city quicker than I could ten in 
the country. The best thing of all is that city 
men do not squeal. Their code of ethics is the 
commercial, not the moral. Their motto is 
6 dog eat dog,' and hence, in the city, dogs are 
respectable. If a man attends a fashionable 
church, and is good pay, he can do about as he 
pleases. If the preacher has old fogy notions, 
and talks about old-fashioned morality, he soon 
gets a sore throat, or his wife needs a change of 
climate. 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 121 

"It is not so in the country. The stupid 
granger looked on my proffered donations as 
1 the price of a dog,' or ' the hire of a prostitute/ 
quoted Scripture, and said Tom Hardman was 
trying to buy his way into heaven with the 
wages of unrighteousness. The city is the 
place for me. There is ten dollars to be had 
by looting corporations to one by skinning 
grangers." 

"Do you mean to tell me," said I, "that 
there is no relief in a corporation for minority 
stockholders? I myself am a minority stock- 
holder in a newspaper corporation, and there is 
trouble ahead with the majority," 

"None, whatever, unless you can prove the 
most glaring fraud. The majority can defraud 
all they please if they have the right kind of a 
lawyer. It can file motions for more explicit 
statements ; can move to strike out part of the 
pleadings, or divide, and thus secure delay ; it 
can then demur, postpone, appeal, ask for new 
trials, and prolong litigation for ten years, until 
the property is entirely eaten up in salaries and 
expenses. The danger of being caught in fraud 
in a corporation never troubles me. I never 
give it a moment's thought." 

I looked at him in amazement and replied: 



122 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

" Tom, this is the first time we have met for 
forty years. It will, in all probability, be the 
last. I will not put in words what I think 
of you and your methods. They are not 
new. They are as old as the Egyptian bondage. 
They are the methods of scoundrels in all ages. 
They have ruined, not men merely, but nations 
and civilizations. The Prophet Micah described 
just such scoundrels as you when he wrote : — 

" * Woe to them that devise iniquity, — and work evil 

upon their beds : 
When the morning is light, they practise it, 
Because it is in the power of their hand. 
And they covet fields and take them by violence ; 
And houses, and take them away : 
So they oppress a man and his house, — even a man and 

his heritage/ 

" He described you to a dot when he said : — 

" * Who hate the good, and love the evil ; 

Who pluck off their skin from off them, — and their flesh 

from off their bones ; 
Who also eat the flesh of my people, — and flay their skin 

from off them ; 
And they break their bones, — and chop them in pieces, 

as for the pot.' 

" It is men like you that are corrupting the 
very foundations of public morality, and fast 



THE HARDMAN FAMILY 123 

bringing about the same condition of things 
which the prophet described when he said: — 

" ' The princes . . . 

. . . abhor judgment, and pervert all equity. 
They build up Zion with blood, — and Jerusalem with 

iniquity. 
The heads thereof judge for reward, — and the priests 

thereof teach for hire, 
And the prophets thereof divine for money.' 

" You are a typical Hardman, not only in 
name and nature, but altogether the meanest, 
lowest, and most dangerous that I have ever 
met ; and notwithstanding all your disbelief in 
a future or a God, or the worth of this present 
life, if this ship were to strike a rock and begin 
to sink, you would be the first man to push the 
women and children out of the life boat in 
order to save your worthless carcass." 

You will, my dear boy, in the future, meet 
with many of this family. You will not find 
many as totally destitute of all human feeling 
and sense of honor as this one. I wish, however, 
to put you on your guard against the whole tribe, 
for when a man hardens himself against right, 
and uses his full power to oppress, whether his 
motive be the love of money or the love of 
power, it is only a question of time, oppor- 



124 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

tunity, and ability when he will fill out the full 
measure of the iniquity of Tom Hardman. It 
is only a question of time when the man who 
abandons the moral code which has made this 
nation great, and gives himself over to the teach- 
ings of commercial morality, current to some 
extent in the country, and more largely in the 
city, w T ill become a moral wreck, deserving of 
the scorn and contempt of all men who love 
their country or their race. 



CHAPTER XV 

commercial morality 

My dear Boy: 

In my last letter I quoted Tom Hardman as 
believing in what he called commercial morality. 
This may possibly be a new term to you and 
need explanation. You have probably assumed 
that there is but one kind of morality, that which 
is taught in the Sabbath-school and from the 
pulpit, which is based on the teachings of Moses 
and the prophets, and finds its best statement 
and application in the Sermon on the Mount. 
Before you have any very large experience in 
the world, you will discover that there is another 
moralit}^, practised but not preached, which per- 
vades very largely the business of the nations, 
of our own nation, and particularly of the large 
cities, — to no little extent of the country, and, 
to some extent, of your own particular neighbor- 
hood. No pulpit proclaims it, no Sabbath-school 
teacher mentions it, no newspaper advocates it, 
no individual avows it until he has reached a 

125 



126 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

point when he feels it safe to defy public opin- 
ion. With this exception, the only men who 
are the avowed believers in this commercial 
morality are common thieves, confidence men, 
gamblers in common gambling houses, gamblers 
on the boards of trade, and other professions 
under the ban of public opinion. The most 
common hypocrisy practised in these modern 
days is that of professing to believe in Christian 
morality, and yet in business practising commer- 
cial morality, and making atonement or compen- 
sation for such practice by liberal contributions 
to the support of Christian morality. 

To make this plain, let me say that Christian- 
ity assumes that there is a possible right and 
wrong in every business transaction ; that the 
moral law governs there, as elsewhere ; that 
there can be no permanent separation of busi- 
ness from morals, and that a fair and just trade 
is as pleasing to the Almighty as a church con- 
tribution, a prayer, or a sermon. If the Bible 
does not teach this in its every page, directly or 
indirectly, I confess I have never been able to 
understand the meaning of that Book. Commer- 
cial morality, on the other hand, assumes that 
business is one thing, benevolence another ; or, 
to put it in the tersest possible terms, business 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 127 

is business ; by which bad men mean that busi- 
ness has no connection whatever with morals or 
religion. Good men frequently use the term 
with an entirely different meaning, namely, that 
business should be conducted on w r ell-established 
business principles. The truth is, that while 
business should be conducted on the principles 
which human experience for ages has proved to 
be correct, none the less will a business con- 
ducted on these principles prove to be one of the 
highest forms of benevolence, in that it will 
encourage thrift, self-control, integritj^, and 
furnish reliable and steady employment to the 
thousands that are not capable of conducting, 
on their own account, large business enterprises. 
While business is not religion, nevertheless it 
furnishes the best possible sphere for the prac- 
tice of the basic principles of all religion, taught 
in every pulpit in Christian lands. If we divorce 
business from religion, we cut the very founda- 
tion from under all the civilization worth retain- 
ing which the world has yet achieved. 

The danger to the farm bo3 r is, that he may 
adopt the maxims which I have quoted above in 
their bad sense, instead of in their true and 
proper sense. It is only a question of time, 
opportunity, and circumstances, when, if he 



128 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

should do so, he will develop a character of 
which Tom Hardman is an extreme, but by no 
means an uncommon, type. The foundation of 
all dishonest business is in buying a thing for less 
than it is worth. Every thoroughly honest trade 
gives a full equivalent for the value received. 
I wish you to get this idea clearly in mind. 
Honest dealing consists in buying things for 
what they are worth, as determined by the sup- 
ply and demand; dishonest dealing consists in 
getting in some way the advantage, and buying 
for less than they are worth. Every trade on 
its face purports to be the exchange of goods, 
or goods for money, as of equal value, or as a 
full equivalent. You say: How is it possible 
for men to make money, or profit by trading, if 
in every honest deal a full equivalent is given ? 
The answer is easy, and can best be given by 
way of illustration. 

Your father raises corn. He grows more 
than the family, or the stock on the farm, can 
consume, or than he desires to keep for an ad- 
vanced price. He sells this corn at its market 
value on the date of sale as determined by the 
supply and demand in the great markets. He 
cannot use or keep it to advantage. He there- 
fore sells it to the man who has use for it, either 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 129 

to feed to his stock, or to ship to a distant 
market at car-load rates, which are always less 
than rates on part of a car-load. While a full 
equivalent is rendered, your father is the gainer, 
because he has disposed of something for which 
he had no present use. The money that he 
receives for it is of more value to him than the 
corn, while the corn is of more value to the 
buyer than the money; hence, both profit by 
this strictly honest trade. 

Your father grows live stock as a means of 
disposing to better advantage the products of 
his farm. When it is properly finished for the 
market, he can no longer use it to advantage 
on the farm. It has gained all that it can gain 
profitably. He ships it to the nearest stock 
market and sells it to the packer, or shipper. 
Your father can use the money to much better 
advantage than he could the live stock; the 
packer can use the live stock to much better 
advantage than he could the money; hence, 
each profits by the transaction, for each has dis- 
posed of an article for which he has no present 
use, — your father, the live stock; the packer, 
the money. 

Your father wishes to buy live stock to con- 
sume his grain, but does not have the money ; 



130 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

the banker has it. He gives his note for six 
months at six or eight per cent interest, figur- 
ing that after paying the interest, and paying 
himself market price for the corn, and a reason- 
able price for the grass and forage that it will 
take to fatten the stock, he will have more left 
than will pay the interest on the note. The 
banker has more money than he needs and he 
loans it for the interest it will bring. The 
banker puts the money to work for him in 
the way of bringing in interest; your father 
puts the money to work in condensing his crops 
for market ; hence, each is a gainer by the trans- 
action, and neither would enter into it unless 
he had reason to believe he would be the gainer. 
Each has rendered to the other a full equivalent, 
and by reason of different circumstances and 
conditions, each makes a profit. 

The same law applies in all kinds of legitimate 
business. A full equivalent is rendered in 
every case with the prospect of possible and 
probable profit to both parties in the transaction. 
All such transactions are in full accord with 
Christian morality. 

Men who are guided by commercial morality 
act from entirely different methods. The idea 
of getting either something for nothing, or much 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 131 

for little, is the prevailing mothre with *beo&. 

For example, the manufacturers of any line of 
goods form a trust. They close up factories, 
dismiss labor, limit production, and advance the 
price, the object being to secure from every con- 
sumer something more than the article is really 
worth, or for which it can be produced. They 
think they can do it, and proceed to do it with- 
out the slightest regard to the rights of labor, or 
to the real cost of production, and on the theory, 
which is the essence of savagery and barbarism, 
that might makes right. The robber barons of 
the Middle Ages who occupied commanding posi- 
tions on the great highways of travel, levied 
blackmail on all comers and goers because they 
could. Their legitimate successors are the rob- 
ber trusts of the nineteenth century, who take 
a few cents from this man, and a few dollars 
from that, simply because they can, or think 
they can. This is commercial morality. 

The railroads have a large amount of what 
is known as watered stock; that is, certificates 
of stock issued without the value of the face of 
the stock being expended in constructing the 
road. In other words, it was issued without 
consideration. In order to secure dividends on 
this watered stock, they have been forming 



132 LETTERS TO THE FAKM BOY 

coirhii^atia-3 for the last twenty or thirty 
years, agreeing to <*dva^o and maintain rates 
and compel the public to pay the increase. 
The only justification made for this is that they 
can. We find, when we get down to the very 
truth, that the basis of all modern rate-making 
is what the traffic will bear; that is, what the 
public can be forced to pay. This is commer- 
cial morality, — the morality of the robber 
baron of the Middle Ages, the morality of the 
thief and the robber. I CAN ; therefore, I 
will. Or, as Rob Roy puts it : Let him take 
who will, and keep who CAN. 

Corporations of all kinds take kindly to com- 
mercial morality. A corporation is an artificial 
person. It is made up of stockholders who 
own shares, and it exempts the shareholder 
from any personal liability beyond the value of 
his shares. Its life is limited to the years pre- 
scribed by the law in the charter, but provides 
for a renewal indefinitely, and a majority vote 
of the shareholders governs. It is thus en- 
dowed with practical immortality. Death, that 
cuts short the robberies of the individual, spares 
the corporation. It has no soul to be saved, or 
to be lost, and hence is very likely to ignore 
all moral precepts, all idea of responsibility to 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 133 

a higher Power, and very gradually develops, 
among men who have much to do with corpora- 
tions, what is known as a corporate conscience, 
— a conscience that has no regard for moral 
law, and but little for human law. For it is a 
curious fact that a man who repudiates moral 
obligations has little respect for legal obliga- 
tions. The more experienced he becomes the 
less respect he has for law, owing to the fact 
that he finds out how easy it is to evade legal 
penalties by methods which I have described in 
a previous letter. Many men, in fact, have 
two consciences, — a corporate conscience and 
an individual. As members of a corporation, 
they will do things, apparently with a clear 
conscience, which they would absolutely scorn 
to do in the transaction of their private busi- 
ness. In the one case commercial morality, or 
the morality of the thief and the robber, gov- 
erns ; in their private business Christian moral- 
ity governs until the greater immediate gain to 
be made by corporation methods blunts the 
Christian conscience, and they become business 
hypocrites, professing one thing and practising 
the opposite. Hence, in large cities business is 
becoming largely dog eat dog, the men in one 
line of business waiting patiently until sharp- 



134 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

ness of competition results in the failure of a 
competitor, and then they all pounce on the 
crippled man and devour his substance, much 
as a pack of wolves stop in their chase to 
devour one that has been shot by the pursued. 

I was sitting, one evening, on the deck of a 
steamer on the Pacific, as the cooks were clear- 
ing off the tables and throwing the scraps out 
of the port-hole into the ocean. Dozens of white 
gulls were following in the wake of the ship, 
and dropping down and devouring the bucket- 
fuls of scraps as they were thrown out on the 
waves. One large, gray gull, of an entirely dif- 
ferent species, followed along leisurely, and just 
as the white gulls began to devour the coveted 
morsels, dropped down amongst them and 
scooped everything into his capacious crop. 
He kept this up for an hour, and I marvelled at 
that bird's capacity, and said to myself : " There 
is a type of business life ; that scoundrel waits 
until the gulls have located the food and had 
a taste, when he swoops down and takes in the 
bulk of it." By sheer force of power he was 
the robber of the sea, and a fine illustration of a 
class of men who are governed only by commer- 
cial morality. 

Nor is the country exempt from the operations 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 135 

of men guided only by commercial morality. 
The horse jockey is, perhaps, the best type, — a 
type, however, so well known by honest men, 
that he is never trusted by farmers. They 
never believe what a horse jockey tells them. 
They, perhaps, have never stated the reason to 
themselves, but it is because he is guided by 
commercial morality. They do not believe him 
even when he is not trading horses. They are 
right in this, for a man who learns to deceive 
in one line will soon learn to deceive in all. A 
more respectable type, but more dangerous, is 
the broker who calls himself a banker and ex- 
torts usury, anywhere from one to five per cent 
a month, because he can. When I hear farm- 
ers say that such a broker, or so-called banker, 
is not in business for his health, I know exactly 
what they mean. 

A still more dangerous type is that of the 
respectable farmer who practises the broker's 
methods. He has money to lend, not to the 
best farmers, but to the worst, whenever their 
hard necessities compel them to pay extortion- 
ate interest. This scoundrel often creates ne- 
cessities by urging men to borrow, when he 
knows that borrowing must lead to loss ; by 
extending credit to an unreasonable limit, and, 



136 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

when he finds the borrower in a tight place 
through crop failures or other misfortunes, put- 
ting on the screws and demanding immediate 
payment, and in default, foreclosing, and bank- 
rupting the borrower. Another example is 
that of the landlord who uses all the power 
given him by a landlord's lien, either to bank- 
rupt the renter completely, or to hold a judg- 
ment over him in such a way as to make him 
his slave for years to come ; and all because the 
lav/ gives him the power, which he mistakes 
for the right. 

I have thus far spoken of men who practise 
commercial morality with a set purpose for gain. 
I should not do justice to a large class of busi- 
ness men were I to fail to state that many of 
them are compelled, in a manner, to practise 
commercial morality, or go out of business. 
Let me illustrate : In the city is a large store 
which repudiates Moses and the Sermon on the 
Mount, and believes thoroughly, in a bad sense, 
that business is business. This store offers for 
sale, at a low price, goods dishonestly made by 
contract, possibly in sweat shops, or in factories 
where shoddy displaces honest material, and 
where workmanship is cheap and poor. This 
class of stores sets the pace which honest men 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 137 

must follow, or go out of business, at least until 
commercial morality is so far educated out of 
buyers that they lose their mania for buying bar- 
gains. Until this is done, the dishonest element 
in business will set the pace which honest men 
must follow, or quit. These dishonest dealers 
compete with each other in the race of securing 
cheaper and more worthless goods, by cheapen- 
ing material, lowering the price of labor, forcing 
honest, but poor, laborers into pauperism, and 
honest and skilled laborers to accept the wages 
of the unskilled. They thus degrade labor, 
demoralize business, debauch the public morals, 
and transform us into a nation of adulterators, 
money-grabbers, and bargain-seekers, until the 
problem of how to be an honest merchant, and 
practise the Sermon on the Mount on week days 
while professing it on the Sabbath, is one of the 
most difficult problems of human experience. 

I seldom hear a lady boasting of how cheap 
she bought a dress or bonnet, without thinking 
of the poorly paid woman who made that dress 
or bonnet. Lazarus must work cheap, beg, or 
starve, in order that Dives maj^ fare sumptu- 
ously every day. The trouble is that the 
mania for cheapness, the craze for the bargain 
counter, pervades the city and country alike ; 



138 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

and when we come to the last analysis, it is 
closely related to the gambler's mania of get- 
ting something for nothing. 

I did not intend to moralize in this way, 
but it is better that you should understand 
before entering on active work some of the 
difficulties and perplexities with which the 
business man must grapple if he intends to 
be a thoroughly honest man. 

It is a very healthy sign that in nearly all 
country communities men who follow these 
practices are more or less under the ban of 
public opinion, an opinion not always expressed, 
but felt. One of the highest compliments that 
farming communities pay to themselves is the 
high honor in which they hold farmers and 
business men of all classes who do business on 
principles of the highest honor. When a man 
sends a car-load of hogs or cattle to the dealer 
at the station, in the full confidence that whether 
the market of the day before be up or down, he 
will get the full value without a previous con- 
tract, he pays him about as high honor as one man 
can well pay another, and I have noticed that 
dealers who treat farmers in this spirit are al- 
most uniformly men who make money. In all 
dealings of man with man, the confidence of the 



COMMERCIAL MORALITY 139 

customer is the most valuable asset of the 
dealer. It is something that cannot be taxed, 
or destroyed by fire, or by flood ; cannot be 
measured by dollars, but is gradually coined into 
dollars as the farmer transforms the rain, the 
sunshine, the electric currents, and the stored 
fertility of the soil into crops. There can be 
no confidence, whatever, reposed in the man 
or corporation which is guided solely by com- 
mercial morality. It is death to manhood, 
death to legitimate business, death to every 
noble feeling and aspiration, and were it gener- 
ally practised, it would be death to the civiliza- 
tion of the nineteenth century. It is under the 
condemnation of every law of God ; it is under 
the ban of all good men ; it is civilized savagery 
and business barbarism; at least, so believes 
your Uncle Henry. 



CHAPTER XVI 

the brodhead family 

My dear Boy: 

When I was your age, although I had been 
very well instructed, as a theological proposi- 
tion, in the doctrine of total depravity, I did not 
believe that such men as Bob Cheatem and 
Tom Hardman had any real existence in coun- 
try places. I thought they belonged to the 
city. I thought the doctrine of total depravity 
had to be modified in many ways to make it 
conform to the facts of existence. I had never 
heard of commercial morality, but a great deal 
of the morality taught from the pulpit and in 
the home. I was taught that while, as an 
abstract principle, men were totally depraved, 
and sinned as soon as they were born, or at 
least as soon as they were able, nevertheless, 
it was but just and fair that men should prove 
themselves bad before I had a right to treat 
them as bad men. It has cost me a good deal 
of money and grief to learn that I was niis- 

140 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 141 

taken in some things, and to discover that, even 
amidst country surroundings, among farmers and 
farm boys, types of the characters I have men- 
tioned were possible and actual. I have painted 
these pictures for j^ou because I have under- 
taken to furnish you sketches from life that 
you may recognize as correct, or at least 
approximately so, in your own county, in any 
county, in any state, and in any land. You 
ought to know something of the world of men 
with whom you must soon deal, and forewarned 
is forearmed. If I were to stop painting these 
pictures now, I would give you an entirely 
wrong conception of human nature. The good 
people, not wholly good, but people who are 
trying to live right lives and deal on honor, as 
in the sight of God, with their fellow-men, out- 
number vastly those who are parasites on soci- 
ety ; not merely parasites but foes to all that is 
good, and who are, by their crooked methods, 
sapping the very foundations of our civilization. 
I shall not be able to find time to tell you of 
the scores and scores of nobler types of farm 
boys who are now making this nation great, — 
the Brodheads, the Goodmans, the Wisemans, 
the Faithfuls, and dozens of other similar types 
well worth sketching. When I come to study 



142 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

the better class of farmers, and the business 
men of the great cities who have grown up on 
the farm, whose lives have been fashioned on 
farm models, the number of pictures that rise 
before me is so great that it embarrasses me to 
make the selection, and I find it impossible to 
find time or space to describe them all. They 
are not all perfect — none of them are. I hold 
it true that there is not "a just man upon 
earth " ; that is, an absolutely just man, " that 
doeth good " always and everywhere, and " sin- 
neth not," nor makes a mistake. I would do 
wrong if I were to describe such. The beauty 
and power of the Scriptures rest largely upon 
the fact that they describe actual men and not 
perfect saints. I always take delight in read- 
ing that story of Moses when he, grown up in 
the court, the companion of princes, got angry 
and killed the Egyptian who was imposing on 
one of his poor and oppressed brethren. It was 
not right for Moses to do so, and on account of 
it he had to leave the country for forty 
years; but I do like to see a man's blood boil 
at the sight of wrong, even if he does make a 
mistake in his methods. If I were judge, these 
men would get off easily. I have always felt 
more kindly to Abraham after reading that fib 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 143 

he told Pharaoh about his good-looking wife. 
It was mean in him to do it, and dangerous as 
well ; but otherwise Abraham would have been 
such a perfect character that you and I would 
not think of trying to imitate him. The story 
of Jacob's sharp practice with Laban in divid- 
ing up the stock, where it was diamond cut 
diamond, the sin of David, and the foolishness 
of Solomon the Wise, all show that the Bible 
paints men as they are, and not as they should 
be; and in my feeble way I am trying to do the 
same thing for you. There is no man that I 
have ever seen that I should like to hold up to 
you as a perfect model. We are all but abridg- 
ments of a perfect humanity, and the very 
strength of character in one right line seems 
almost of necessity to involve a corresponding 
weakness in some other line. 

Of all the types of men I have met, I know 
few that are more deserving of your imitation 
than the Brodheads, although some others are 
equally worthy. Perhaps I take more kindly 
to these than most others, for the reason that 
Squire Brodhead was one of my earliest advisers, 
notwithstanding the disparity in our years. He 
was my friend and my father's friend. No true 
man can hold in anything else than very great 



144 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

reverence, the man who has been both his friend 
and his father's friend. A friendship that will 
last through two generations is of the right sort, 
and must be based on real merit. Nothing short 
of genuine worth will bear that sort of strain. 
I call him squire, which he was not legally, but 
in fact. He never was a justice of the peace. 
He obtained his title because, when compara- 
tively a young man, he was noted for being able 
to tell his neighbors, whenever any difficulty 
occurred between them, what was the right 
thing to do, and the right time to do it. He was 
one of those men whose breadth and clearness 
of view enable them to get at the real rights of 
things, and he had the wisdom to know what to 
say and when to say it. He, therefore, became 
by common consent an arbitrator of disputes, 
and general adviser, and they dubbed him The 
Squire. I have heard that they tried to elect 
him once, and did elect him against his protest, 
but he refused to qualify, by saying that he had 
a poor opinion of law and of lawyers ; did not 
believe, in fact, that honest men had anything 
to do with law, that they lived above it ; and 
quoted the Scripture : " The law was not made 
for the righteous man, but for the lawless and 
disobedient." He once told me that two of his 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 145 

neighbors quarrelled and emploj^ed able lawyers, 
and that he happened to know that one of the 
lawyers had said to the other : " We have two 
fat geese to be picked, and are foolish if we do 
not get a fine crop of feathers every term of 
court." He told the litigants this fact, settled 
their difficulties for them, and made up his mind, 
as he afterward told me, that there should be no 
litigation between his neighbors if he could pos- 
sibly help it ; and therefore he was The Squire 
until the day of his death. 

He was a first-class farmer, — one of the best 
I have ever known. He was not a particularly 
hard worker. He used to tell me, in fact, that 
if a man did not work with his brains it was not 
much matter whether he worked with his hands 
or not. He seemed to make money easily, and the 
neighbors counted him lucky. I once asked him 
the secret of his success, and he said there was no 
secret about it ; that when everybody wanted to 
buy, he sold ; and when the neighbors wanted to 
sell, he bought ; and that it was always safe to 
buy as much as you had money to pay for when 
it was offered at less than the cost of production. 
When the neighbors quit breeding horses because 
of the construction of the Pennsylvania railroad, 
thinking there would be no further market for 



146 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

them, he began growing colts, giving it as his 
judgment that the development of the country, 
as the result of steam carriage, would increase 
the demand for horses far beyond anything that 
had ever been known before. He was the first 
in our neighborhood to introduce tile drainage, 
among the first to grow clover, to use the drill, 
the mowing machine, the horse rake, and the 
reaper. 

He was a man of very decided opinions on any 
subject on which he would give an opinion at all, 
and one of the most admirable traits of his char- 
acter was that he had the most profound respect 
for the exactly opposite opinions held by his 
neighbors. His cousin James, living on the ad- 
joining farm, was a man of the same mould of 
character. Both were true Brodheads, differing 
widely on many subjects, especially on politics 
and religion ; and yet between the two there was 
never the slightest misunderstanding, or even 
the suspension of the most intimate personal rela- 
tions. The Squire was a Presbyterian of the most 
pronounced type; James was, on all doctrinal 
points a good Methodist. The Squire was a Whig, 
believed in a protective tariff and public improve- 
ments, and spelled the word nation with a big 
N ; James was a Democrat, — other Whigs called 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 147 

him a Locofoco, the Squire never, — believed in 
free trade, as little government as possible, was 
jealous of the encroachments of the national 
government, spelled both state and nation with 
capitals ; James always put up a tall hickory 
pole as soon as the campaign opened ; the Squire 
allowed his boys to put up a Whig pole as tall, 
but no taller. The anti-slavery feeling was ris- 
ing, and the Squire kept a station on the under- 
ground railway. One of his boys was conductor, 
and many a slave fleeing from bondage, who in 
some mysterious way had found a hiding-place in 
an obscure corner of his barn, was spirited away to 
Canada. James believed — and in this differed 
from nearly all his Methodist brethren, to their 
great grief and shame — in the rights of the 
slaveholder as determined by the Dred Scott 
decision ; but he did not allow himself nor his 
boys to know that, when the Squire's barn or 
cellar were likely to be searched, there was a 
similar place in his barn, provided without his 
knowledge, where a fugitive might find safety, 
and often did. Had he known it, he would have 
told the sheriff, if asked ; but he made it a point 
never to know. 

Many a long winter evening have I been an 
eager listener to the arguments of these men on 



148 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

divine sovereignty and free will, on election 
and reprobation, on tariff and free trade, or 
whatever subject might come up. I have al- 
ways admired the dignity and courtesy which 
these old men showed to each other in their dis- 
cussions, the one never speaking until the other 
was through; and I have since observed that 
gentlemen of the highest breeding and most 
perfect manners, wherever I have found them, 
do the same. The Squire used to close up his 
argument on tariff something in this waj^ : — 

" What is the use, James, of importing a sin- 
gle ton of iron ? Don't you see that in import- 
ing it from abroad we are importing the ore, 
the coal, the labor, and the food that it costs to 
support the laborer and his teams, when we 
have all these raw materials lying around us 
cheaper than any place in the world ? " 

And James would answer : " Don't you know, 
Squire, that every fall you have to come to me 
for watermelons and sweet potatoes grown on 
my sandy bottom, because I can grow them 
cheaper and better than you can on your heavy 
soil? Why not have trade as free between 
nations as between states, and allow every man 
to buy where he can buy the cheapest, and sell 
where he can sell the dearest ? " 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 149 

And then they would shake hands, wish each 
other good night, and in less than a week have 
another set-to and go over the same, or similar, 
ground again. 

Many years afterward, when I was a man 
grown, I met the old Squire, then bent with 
age, and we talked over the past. He told me 
of the death of James, and his great grief and 
loneliness, spoke of the old discussions, and, 
pointing to the hub of an old w r agon wheel, 
with the spokes partly broken off, the felly 
and tire gone, he said : " You see those ants 
on that hub. They may be discussing ques- 
tions similar to those James and I used to dis- 
cuss. Those two little fellows may be arguing 
whether the spokes starting in opposite direc- 
tions can ever meet, concluding in their wisdom 
that it is impossible, and the older, larger, and 
wiser ant may be telling them that they know 
nothing at all ; that he has travelled farther, and 
can assure them that were this wheel complete, 
there would be a felly which would bind all 
the spokes together, and an iron tire around it 
that would hold them fast ; and that seeming con- 
tradictions may all be harmonized in the larger 
field of perfect knowledge. I have no doubt 
James understands it now, and that I shall soon." 



150 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

I have dwelt long upon the Squire and the 
Brodhead family. I want you to know them. 
You will find this type more or less clearly 
defined in every township and county. In fact, 
I have found it wherever I have lived or trav- 
elled, and if it were not for that type of men, 
this country, and all countries, would be in a 
bad way. You will not always find them as 
lovely in character as my old friend the Squire. 
The fact is, his grandmother was a Goodman, 
and there was a fine blending of these two 
types in both him and his cousin James. Away 
back in Bible times, as far back as the period of 
the Judges, they are described as men " having 
understanding of the signs of the times to know 
what Israel ought to do." They are the men 
who do not lose their heads in time of danger 
to state or nation ; who take broad views of 
public, as well as private, business, and who, to 
use a homely expression, sense things up about 
right. 

They are not always religious people. I wish 
they were. The difference between them and 
the Goodmans is that the Brodheads think 
things out. The Goodmans feel their way to 
conclusions, " walk by faith," as it were, while 
the Brodheads walk more or less "by sight." 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 151 

A man learns to lean on his strongest faculties. 
If gifted with unusually clear perceptions and 
the faculty of clear thinking, he learns to depend 
on his own judgment, his reasoning powers ; 
whereas, if he cannot see his way clear, he falls 
back on his intuitions of right and wrong. The 
most perfect types of the family see clearly 
enough, however, that nothing that is morally 
wrong can be intellectually right ; that it never 
pays in the long run to be dishonest or unfair; 
that there are laws not of man's enacting, that 
remorselessly grind out retribution to all sorts 
of evil-doers, and bring, in time, their just re- 
ward to the well-doer. 

The Brodheads are not all rich, by any means. 
Few of them, indeed, are very rich. You will 
frequently find them handling great enterprises 
for other people, themselves only in moderate 
circumstances. It is very seldom, indeed, that 
you will find them poor, or even in limited cir- 
cumstances, and never except when some mis- 
fortune has happened to them which no foresight 
possible could avoid. They do not take kindly 
to what is known as practical politics ; that is, 
to office getting and holding. When a Brod- 
head and a Featherhead compete for the first 
time for nomination in any party, the Feather- 



152 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

head has the better chance of winning, because 
he will do things a Brodhead will not do, and 
can be used by designing men, which a Brod- 
head cannot. When you get a Brodhead into 
the legislature or congress, however, and he has 
a chance to make a record, and the people get 
to know him, he is likely to become a statesman 
and stay in office as long as he likes. 

The Brodheads are not always popular. 
They are often supposed to be aristocratic and 
exclusive, for the simple reason that they will 
not allow themselves to be hail-fellow-well-met 
with everybody. They try to keep themselves 
out of the dirt, that is all, and I like that feature of 
their character. They are often blunt in speech 
and abrupt in manner. That is a fault. They 
are sometimes blamed for not being sufficiently 
enthusiastic in a good cause, with being defi- 
cient in holy zeal in revival times, and political 
zeal during heated campaigns. There may be 
ground for criticism, but I have always noticed 
that when a real crisis comes in church or state, 
the men who criticise them for lack of zeal go 
to them for counsel. 

You see, I am not sketching perfection in 
character. I could not do it if I would. It 
does not exist on earth. I do not set the Brod- 



THE BRODHEAD FAMILY 153 

heads before you as perfect models, for they are 
not. You will, however, make a serious mis- 
take if you do not study them thoroughly, and 
get into close, personal touch with them when- 
ever you can. They are among the easiest of 
all men to approach. They know the right sort 
of a farm boy on sight and take to him at once. 
It is otherwise with the Featherheads and their 
near relatives, the Lightheads. Keep away 
from men of these types. You can do them no 
good, nor can they you. The Brodheads can 
and will. Your future will depend largely on 
the kind of men with whom you associate. 
Personally, I owe the Brodheads more than I 
can tell you. Their advice has not always been 
what I expected, and in dealing with me they 
have often used great plainness of speech which 
sometimes hurt ; but when I have slighted their 
counsels I have generally had occasion to regret 
it. I predict that your experience will not 
differ very greatly from that of your Uncle 
Henry. 



CHAPTER XVII 

types of common people 

My dear Boy : 

When I was your age I used to think that 
the people most talked about favorably in the 
papers, and out of them, were those best worth 
knowing. The preacher, the doctor, the judge 
(my mother was always suspicious of lawyers), 
the members of congress, were all great men in 
my estimation. I was disposed to look upon the 
very rich man with something of awe. You 
may, perhaps, have the same notions. As I grew 
older in years and experience I changed my opin- 
ions somewhat. So will you. I found that the 
men best worth knowing, the men I could 
depend upon to stand by me in everything 
which seemed to them right and just, were not 
the smartest men, nor the richest, nor those the 
newspapers talked about, but the plain, common 
people, of whom there is usually very little 
public record beyond the fact that they were 
born, married, and in time died, leaving more 

154 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 155 

or less of an estate, honestly gathered, to be 
divided among their wives and children. They 
do not, it is true, seem to make very much stir 
in the world, but if they were taken out of it, 
there would not be much left that is worth pre- 
serving, and the end of all things might about 
as well come at once. We could get along rea- 
sonably well with less than half the doctors, 
with one-fourth the lawyers, and we might even 
spare a few of the preachers. We could very 
well spare about nine out of ten of our 
small politicians, and might get along, in a 
pinch, without the millionnaires ; but we could 
not get along without the common people who 
rent from others, or own their forties, eighties, 
quarter sections, or their modest homes in the 
cities ; whose daily toil sweetens their bread, 
who live honest lives, train their families to 
habits of thrift and economy, and who form the 
sound and honest core of their church, their 
political party, and, in short, make this nation, 
and all nations, great. 

The sooner you know these people and get in 
close touch with them, the better for you. 
They are the real source of what we call com- 
mon sense, which, outside of Holy Writ, is the 
safest guide in all the affairs of life. If you are 



156 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

ever to retain permanently any position of trust 
and power that you may secure, and thus be- 
come a man of wide and commanding influence, 
you can do it only by being worthy of the abid- 
ing confidence of the plain, common people. 
You have heard, perhaps, of the advice Presi- 
dent Lincoln gave to Governor Oglesby, as 
follows : " Stand by the common people, Rich- 
ard; keep close to the common people." The 
deserved confidence which the common people 
had in Abraham Lincoln was the secret of his 
great power ; and his ability to retain that con- 
fidence in the most trying times this nation 
ever saw is the most convincing evidence of 
his supreme greatness of soul. It was the faith 
of the common people in Horace Greeley that 
made him the tribune of the people, and that 
gave the Tribune the regal power it wielded in 
those days, so full of peril to the republic. The 
common people will hear any man gladly who 
can at once teach the truth and live it. 

There are many families, or types, of the 
common people, but when you come to study 
them closely, and learn the secrets of their lives, 
there are a few traits that stand out prominently 
and are common to almost every type. You 
will discover that they are honest, not merely 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 157 

in their private affairs, but in their convictions 
on matters of public concern as well, — honest, 
not because it pays to be honest (for this is 
not honesty at all, but merely enlightened selfish- 
ness), but because honesty is eight, and was 
right for ages before Moses voiced the principles 
of honesty in the Ten Commandments. They 
are truthful, not because truth has a high com- 
mercial value — which it certainly has — but 
because untruthfulness is eternally wrong and 
utterly evil. The common people, as a rule, 
resent wrong and injustice, despise the despot, 
and loathe the liar. They believe in their 
church, in the principles of their party, in plain 
speaking, right doing, in good, honest men and 
in honest work well done. I do not mean to 
say they are perfect, for perfection does not 
exist in this world, nor that they cannot be 
deceived or misled for the time by designing 
men, nor that they always recognize their best 
friends at first sight; but that at heart they 
mean right, and aim to stand for all that is best 
and purest in our civilization. I had rather 
plead a just cause before the plain, common 
people, than before any court in Christendom, 
however learned. 

I wish you to know these common people, 



158 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

not merely because they have been good to me 
all my life, and have always stood y by me in 
time of trouble, but because they are in them- 
selves better worth your study than any other 
class, or all other classes put together. Take, 
for example, my old friend, Hodge Ploughman. I 
do not know whether Hodge was the name his 
mother gave him or not. I suspect that he was 
called Hodge for the same reason that we called 
his Irish neighbor Pat, and his Scotch neighbor 
Sandy. He was an Englishman, a farm laborer 
in his native country, and never seemed to 
know exactly how to handle his h's. If he did 
not know where to put his h's every time, he 
did know how to handle the plough, and no man 
in the neighborhood could draw a straighter 
furrow, nor one more uniform in depth and 
width. He used to say to me that a bad man 
could not do good ploughing ; that it was not bad 
luck that was the matter with the crops, but 
crooked furrows of uneven depth and width; 
and, since I have looked into the science of 
the matter, I believe Hodge was at least partly 
right. No man in the neighborhood could 
build a stack, whether of grain, hay, straw, 
or even corn fodder, that could equal Hodge 
Ploughman's. I used to tell him it was a waste 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 159 

1 of time to stack with such care and precision, 
and he would say : " What is time given us for 
but to do things right? I could not sleep of 
nights if my work was not well done." 

These may seem to you small matters, but I 
have always found that he that is " faithful in 
the least, is faithful also in much; and he that 
is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much"; 
and that it is always well to know, admire, imi- 
tate, and win the confidence of the man who 
does everything as if the Lord had his eye on him 
all the time. You will not often find that sort 
of men very far wrong on any of the great 
questions of life. 

I should like you to know my Scandinavian 
friend, Ole Oleson. You will find men of his 
type in almost every township in the West. 
For your benefit I have coaxed him to tell me 
the story of his life. When he and his young 
wife, in coming to this country, reached the 
last station on the railroad, he had but ten cents 
left and a hundred miles to travel to the home 
of the only man he knew in all this broad land. 
They invested that ten cents in bread, and 
started out on foot. They got there some way, 
as resolute folks generally do, hired out, and 
in time had money enough to enter a quarter 



160 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

section of government land. They built a sod 
house, in due time earned enough to buy house- 
hold furniture and a cow, and had to wait until 
the cow brought them two steer calves, and 
until they were old enough to work, before Ole 
could have a team of his own. It was eight 
long years before he could walk behind a plough 
drawn by a team of his own horses. To-day 
he has nearly three hundred acres of land all 
his own (no mortgage), all well improved; has a 
good lot in town, hard by the church of his 
choice, — the Lutheran, — where he expects to 
build a comfortable home in case he should 
ever want to leave the farm; has educated two 
sons for the professions, has a third for a partner 
on the farm, is a magistrate, has been county 
supervisor, and is a man whose friendship and 
influence, political and otherwise, are well worth 
having. There are plenty of men of this type 
everywhere, and they are well worth your 
knowing. I had rather have the confidence of 
a man of this sort, than that of hundreds who 
make their living by looking after soft snaps ; 
by taking mean advantage of others in their 
misfortunes, or, to use their own phrase, liv- 
ing by their wits. 

You should know my friend, Sandy McGregor, 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 161 

or some of his kin folks, whom you will run 
across before yon are much older. Sandy was a 
shepherd lad when he left Scotland, and brought 
with him a genuine love for oatmeal porridge 
and a good understanding of the Shorter Cate- 
chism, — which two taken together, I have 
always observed, make a well-balanced ration 
when you are feeding for brains, muscle, and 
morals. Sandy was poor, but none the less 
hopeful and happy for all that. He was used 
to it. He went to work at the first job that 
offered, which was tending bricklayers, won the 
confidence of the boss of the job, who speedily 
offered him something better than the hod; 
and kept right on until he got money enough 
ahead to buy a team and farming outfit. He 
rented land and finally fastened on an eighty 
of good land, wrought hard and saved, until 
he had it paid for. I have often observed that 
the Sandy McGregors know good land when 
they see it, and it is not worth while to look 
for them in a country which is naturally poor. 

You would do well to know the Sandy 
McGregors pretty thoroughly. They are good 
troops when j^ou need help, but I should advise 
you not to argue with them upon any subject 
on which you are not thoroughly posted — and 



162 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

especially not upon a religious subject. They 
are apt to be a bit blunt in speech, and may 
even take delight in setting your sins in order 
before you. They like you none the less for 
all that. They will seldom tell you how much 
they think of you. In fact, I have heard that 
they never tell that even to their wives and 
children. If I had the making of the Sandy 
McGregors I would put a little more sweeten- 
ing in them, and plane off some of the rough 
edges. But then, we have to take people as 
we find them, and we can well excuse a little 
plain speaking if behind it all there is a heart 
as tender as a woman's, and a profound rever- 
ence for the Supreme Being, whom alone Sandy 
recognizes as Lord of his conscience. 

Then, there is my old friend, Hans Schmidt. 
You should " stand in " with him and his kin 
folks, which you can do best by practising his 
virtues, and by dealing with him on honor. 
You can dicker, if you like, with Sandy Mc- 
Gregor, for he ra,ther likes the keen encounter 
of wits in fixing prices. He knows what he is 
going to take beforehand, and you know what 
you will give, and there is some amusement 
after all in dickering ; but you had better make 
but one price in your dealing with Hans. 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 163 

Hans is a hard worker, patient, tireless, eco- 
nomical, a man of deep affections, and delights 
as much as any man I ever knew in his home 
life. He is a good liver — when he can afford 
it — and knows how to live economically when 
he must. When you once get his confidence 
he will be j^our steadfast friend ; but woe be to 
you if you forfeit that confidence by any sort 
of trickery or deception, either in word or 
deed. 

Nor would I have you forget Patrick Malo- 
ney and his ilk. His great-great-grandfather 
and mine used to enjoy cracking each other's 
skulls on Fair days, and at other times, over 
politics and religion. Pat's ancestor thought 
mine was a robber and a heretic ; and my ances- 
tor thought Pat's was a bloodthirsty Papist, who 
would burn him at the stake, if he could ; and 
so they had it out with each other whenever 
they had a chance ; and, from what I can learn, 
they seldom lacked, or neglected to improve, 
an opportunity. Mr. Maloney and I often talk 
these matters over. We, at least, understand 
each other, and give each other credit for sin- 
cerity and good intentions, even if we do not 
alwaj^s agree. He honestly thinks my religion 
is too much of a head religion, and I am some- 



164 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

times inclined to think he is about half right. 
I think, on the other hand, that he is inclined 
to take too much for granted, and relies too 
much on outward forms. But we are both good- 
humored about it, and talk much less about 
that than some other things on which we are 
entirely agreed. For example, we are both 
agreed in our hatred of oppression and tyranny 
of every kind; we believe in honest dealing 
and fair play, and we both applaud when Sandy 
McGregor sings his favorite song, " A man's a 
man for a' that, and a' that." I assure you 
that you will find no better friends in the world 
than the Patrick Maloneys, if you stand firmly 
for the rights of the common people, and your 
own. 

There is another large class of our native 
common people whom you should know inti- 
mately and thoroughly. You will not only lose 
much by not knowing them, but their history 
will furnish you material for a lifetime of 
study. I mean that very large combination of 
several types whose ancestors, from time to 
time, sought, in the wilds of our then new coun- 
try, refuge, not from grinding poverty, but 
from oppression in various forms ; who sought 
in the republic, not worldly gain, but religious 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 165 

freedom. In their various original types they 
were the Puritans, whose ancestors fought with 
Cromwell and gave England civil liberty; the 
Huguenots of France, of whom Milton sang, 
" Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints " ; the 
devout Protestants of the Netherlands; the 
Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who for 
ages had never been so happy as when fighting 
for a good cause ; who blazed their way in the 
forests north and south, and brought with them 
the log college, as well as the church and school- 
house ; and the Quakers, the men who were wont 
to listen to the monitions of the inward voice, 
and were as thoroughly men of peace as the last 
named were men of war. 

One hundred and fifty years and more of the 
enjoyment of civil and religious liberty have 
welded all these and other kindred types into a 
native or peculiarly American type, the mould- 
ing and dominating type among the native com- 
mon people, and which seems by an irresistible 
power to take hold of and assimilate Hodge, 
Ole, Sandy, Pat, Hans, and whoever else may 
come ; to digest, so to speak, every type that 
seeks, for any reason, to share the blessings 
which Providence has showered on this broad 
land, absorbing their virtues, and casting off 



166 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

their vices. Especially is this type the control- 
ling, dominating force in the rural districts 
where the common, everyday virtues grow and 
thrive better than in the glare and noise of the 
more public life of the great cities. 

It is the homes of these common people, na- 
tive and foreign, that have ever been the nurs- 
eries of the men who have made this nation 
great and guided it through all its perils. 
These great leaders have guided all the more 
easily because they have been brought up in 
these homes and have kept themselves in close 
touch and entire sympathy with the men who 
make up the town meeting, as the New Eng- 
landers would say, or, as we say in the West, 
the township primary. 

So long as you stay on the farm, you will find 
it all important to your happiness and success to 
have the confidence of all that is best in country 
life. If you go into business or the professions, 
you will find that confidence a tower of strength, 
and if you ever enter upon a public career, you 
will sooner or later be undone without it. You 
may fool the common people once or twice, you 
may sell their confidence to their foes, but you 
cannot fool them always; and whenever they 
find you out, as they will, you are undone for- 



TYPES OF COMMON PEOPLE 167 

ever, and may look upon their verdict as a fore- 
taste of the retribution which a just and right- 
eous God inflicts sooner or later on those of 
whom it is said : " Their foot shall slide in due 
time." 



CHAPTER XVIII 

the good man 

My dear Boy: 

In examining a piece of machinery which 
you have never before seen, or of which you 
have never read nor heard, the first question 
that arises in your mind is : What is it good for ? 
What was the object of the inventor in design- 
ing it, and the builder in making it? The 
question will sooner or later arise in your mind, 
if it has not already : For what was this world 
made ? What was the final and ultimate object 
of the Creator, to use the language of the Scrip- 
tures, in founding it upon the floods; in stretch- 
ing over it the firmament ; in watering it with 
showers ; in storing it with fuel and minerals ; 
in planting it with grains and fruits and weeds, 
healthful and poisonous; in stocking it with 
beasts and birds, helpful and hurtful ; in giving 
it every variety of climate and scenery, and 
every combination of soil, from total barrenness 
to the most lavish fertility, and in constantly 

168 



THE GOOD MAN 169 

guiding it and controlling it through all the 
ages? 

We know of but one answer that can be 
rightly made; namelj r , This world was made, 
and is now governed, for the production of the 
good man — the man whose ideas of justice, 
mercy, and of truth are a more or less distinct 
reflection of Him who is Justice, Mercy, and 
Truth ; whose tenderness, thoughtfulness, and 
compassion are a reflection, however dim, of the 
tenderness, thoughtfulness, and compassion of 
Almighty God. If this be not the object in 
view in the creation and government of this 
world, then it seems to me to have been a hor- 
rible mistake and a pitiable failure. If this be 
the object, then you will be co-worker and helper 
with the Power that is above and behind all 
things, if it be the supreme aim of your life to 
be a good man, to form a character that will be 
a reflection of the Character which guides and 
controls all things below, and to do this right 
thing and avoid that wrong, not for appearance' 
sake, nor for profit, nor for even an example to 
others, but because of its bearing on the forma- 
tion of your own character. 

A good man, like all other things esteemed 
good, has many counterfeits, I would not have 



170 LETTERS TO THE FAEM BOY 

you become, in the slightest degree, the goody- 
goody man, the man who is so weak in intellect 
or deficient in force of character, so lacking in 
manliness, that he is in no man's way, or who in 
one way or other constantly parades his imag- 
ined goodness and demands your admiration. 
The sun needs no placard announcing : This is 
the sun. The man who finds it necessary to 
tell you that he is a good man will need con- 
stant watching. He knows that he is not to be 
trusted, and in professing superior goodness 
(when his goodness is not called in question) 
he is simply aiming to smother the suspicion, 
constantly arising in his own mind, that he is 
at heart a rogue. 

I would have you constantly on your guard 
against that hoary old hypocrite who has made 
an idol of some creed or confession, and stands 
ready to denounce all who do not believe in it 
as beyond the possibility of redemption; whose 
goodness consists in bewailing the sins of 
others, and who, if occupying a high position in 
church or society, is ready to pounce with 
almost savage delight on some young man or 
woman who has sinned or gone wrong, as though 
he himself were sinless. When a lot of these 
gray-haired scoundrels brought a real sinner 



THE GOOD MAN 171 

before the only absolutely good Man that ever 
lived, and asked His judgment. He gave it to 
them as follows : " Let him that is without sin 
among you. east the first stone." stoning to 
death being- the le^al penalty. Without a word 

O 3 1 k. 

they went out from His presence, "beginning 
at the eldest." observing even in their defeat 
and confusion all the forms of ecclesiastical 
etiquette. The church suffers more to-day 
from this form of bastard goodness than from 
all the cavils and scoffs of the infidel. 

I have spent some time in sketching for your 
use various types of good men whom it has 
been my good fortune to know personally and 
intimately in the last fifty years: some in the 
lowliest walks of life, men and women who in 
straitened circumstances, and even in extreme 
poverty, were enabled by a power not of this 
world to maintain their honor and integrity 
unspotted, and walk by a clear light, which 
came from neither sun. moon, nor stars, and 
which I can liken only to the unclouded light 
of the Divine Countenance. Others were well- 
to-do farmers, living testimonies in favor of all 
things good, right, and pure, who did not need 
to say that there was not a stain on a dollar 
they owned. The whole neighborhood knew 



172 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

that. Others still, who, amid the glare of 
wealth and the greedy scramble for gain, were 
living witnesses of the truth of the old saying, 
" Godliness is profitable in all things, having 
the promise of the life that now is, and that 
which is to come." Still others, amid all the 
strife and contention of political life, have been 
able to die poor men in order that the common 
people of this land might have just, wise laws, 
faithfully administered. Of these last I think 
it may be said at the last day, " These have 
come up out of great tribulation " ; for I verily 
believe that the severest test of character in 
these modern times has been made when a 
public man successfully overcomes the tempta- 
tion to enrich himself in the public service by 
treachery to the common people, while eating 
their bread. 

I will not show you these sketches I have 
made, because they all seem to me far short of 
even my own ideal of a good man, and I cannot 
find it in my heart to point out to you why and 
wherein they failed, as they each have in some 
respect. Rather would I point out to you the 
only perfect Life that has ever been lived on 
this planet, and ask you to take your ideal 
from that, and reverence every man in the 



THE GOOD MAN 173 

proportion that he has realized in his life that 
perfect ideal. If I were to define the good 
man in words, I should say that he is the man 
who sincerely believes in a just, and therefore 
merciful, God, and who does his best every day 
of his life, whether in a high position or a low, 
to do His will. I base goodness on right con- 
victions, and I do not know of any other source 
of right convictions than faith in the Supreme 
Ruler of this world. There is a superficial 
goodness, not consciously simulated, that is a 
matter of habit, of good surroundings and asso- 
ciations, of environment, so to speak, which 
readily passes for the genuine until it is se- 
verely tried, and then it usually fails utterly. 
I have ever found in my life that the man who 
has no genuine convictions anchored in some- 
thing outside of this world, will not do to " tie 
to." When tried he will be " like a broken 
tooth or a foot out of joint." It is the men 
w r ho believe in the eternal verities who have 
secured for themselves and for us the rights 
and liberties we enjoy as a people, and who 
were ready to die, and many of whom did die, 
that we might enjoy them. 

If I were to define the good man still further, 
I should say he lives constantly under oath. 



174 LETTEES TO THE FARM BOY 

His word is his oath because always spoken 
under the conviction, more or less conscious, 
"Thou God seest me." His words are spoken 
and acts done as if in the presence of the 
Supreme Ruler, and hence his farm, his home, 
his place of business, are as sacred as the com- 
munion table. You will discover as you grow 
older and more experienced, that one of the 
best evidences of human goodness is the mani- 
festation of pity for, and charitable judgment 
of, the man or woman, and especially of the 
young man or woman, who has unintentionally 
and without forethought gone wrong. It is 
said of the one sinless Being that He could have 
compassion on the ignorant and those that are 
out of the way: "Who can be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities, and was tempted 
in all points like as we are, yet without sin." 

The man who is glad to find sin in others, 
thereby confesses his own sinfulness. The man 
who is swift to condemn, and especially with- 
out hearing both sides, plainly shows his lack of 
real goodness. Every man who is striving to 
walk in the paths of uprightness will have 
genuine pity for those who have striven and 
failed. Every man who knows the dangers 
that lurk in the path of the young man or 



THE GOOD MAN 175 

woman ; who knows how easy it is to sin with- 
out intending it ; who knows something of the 
power of inherited evil; and who has seen a 
little of the inexpressible cruelty and heartless- 
ness of what Burns calls the " unco' guid," or 
the overmuch good, man, will, if he be a good 
man and true, cover up the fault and try to 
lift the fallen. 

A young peasant girl, barefoot, and plainly 
but neatly dressed, was once brought before a 
Scotch session for the sin of joining in a simple 
country dance. The elders dealt out to the 
poor child the terrors of the law, until she 
burst into tears, when the old preacher, who 
had been a country lad himself, said, " Jennie, 
were ye thinking o' anything wrang when ye 
danced ? " " Indeed, I was not." " Then, Jen- 
nie, my child, aye dance." 

If I were to give you an infallible sign of a 
good man, I should say that he is the man who, 
while holding himself rigidly to the highest 
standard of living, yet deals with the greatest 
leniency with those who have sinned. He 
draws sharp and clear the distinction between 
the wrong and the wrongdoer. Instead of try- 
ing to crush those who have fallen in the strife, 
he aims to place their feet in the right path, 



176 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

saying in the words of the Master, "Go, and 
sin no more." 

Do not think I am preaching you a sermon, 
for I am not. I have written you much in 
these letters regarding the conduct of your life 
on its secular, or worldly, side. I wish you to 
succeed in every praiseworthy and right thing ; 
to make money on the farm, or off it, if you 
prefer that; to have you honored by your 
fellow-men ; but, above all, I should like you 
to be a good man, not merely for your own 
sake, but because the world needs good men 
much more than it needs either rich men or 
great men. I should like you to be a good 
man in the truest sense of the word; a man 
who is not only on the right side of all public 
questions, but right in all his dealings, in his 
influence at home and away from home, for the 
reason that the final, perfect, and complete har- 
vest which this world yields to the hand of its 
Maker is a crop of good men and women. I 
should like you to be one of the sheaves, and 
not a weed to be destroyed. 

I think most farm boys sincerely desire to be 
good men. The trouble is that they do not 
know just how to go about it. How do you 
learn to plough if not by ploughing ? You may 



THE GOOD MAN 177 

read about ploughing for months, you may watch 
other men plough, but you will never learn to 
plough except by ploughing. The man who 
made the plough may tell you all about the con- 
struction of it, and how to mend it when out of 
repair. That will be a great help provided you 
plough ; otherwise not. He who has made you 
has told you what you must do to be a good man. 
You will find it in the one book of all others, 
which we call the Bible, or the Book ; but you 
will never understand a precept of that Book 
rightly except by the doing of it. You can do it 
best right at home, by showing respect and obe- 
dience to your father and mother, kindness to 
your brothers and sisters ; by doing good, consci- 
entious work on the farm, and standing for right 
things among the boys. You can set yourself 
to thinking and doing these things, the doing of 
which forms the right character. You will not 
go far on these lines until you feel the need of 
that Elder Brother who is revealed to you, and 
to me, as the ideal Man, God manifest in the 
flesh, who, as the Divine Man, has made atone- 
ment, once for all, for your sin and mine, and 
you will find in Him a never failing Helper. 
You cannot commit your all to Him and enlist 
in His service too soon. 



178 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

You will get help from unexpected sources 
when you need it ; seldom before you need it. 
I believe it to be everlastingly true that " the 
steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord," 
and that "he delighteth greatly in his way." 
By this I understand that not only do the laws 
of this world work, in the end, for righteousness 
in a general way, but that there is an Overruling 
Providence that shapes and marks out the path 
of one who is sincerely aiming and striving to 
be a good man, and guides his steps therein. I 
believe with David, that " Though he [the good 
man] fall, he will not be cast down utterly, 
because the Lord upholds him mightily with 
his right hand." I believe the Father, in his 
wise providence, deals with good men more 
severely, if they do wrong, than he does with 
evil men, and that because he loves them bet- 
ter; that bad men will be allowed to pros- 
per for a time in certain courses where good 
men would fail ; just as a father would punish 
his son for doing things, which he would no 
more than rebuke in the son of a neighbor. 
We often see this principle illustrated, even in 
modern politics. A good man who has done 
wrong and made a mistake is left at home; and 
a scoundrel who has done the same thing, and 



THE GOOD MAN 179 

others ten times worse, is given office in his 
stead. It is strange, but it is not all wrong. 
Good men who go wrong deserve punishment. 
The Lord will attend to the scoundrels when 
he gets readjr. No man, however, will ever go 
far wrong if he takes counsel with his con- 
science and uses that Word which " is a lamp 
unto the feet and a light unto the path." If you 
are in doubt as to whether a thing is right, don't 
do it. 

Instead of being a hindrance to you in busi- 
ness, as you may at first suppose, and as many 
would have you suppose, the character which I 
have urged you to form will help you in the 
most w r onderful way. There is not now, nor 
has there ever been, enough of boys who live 
and work on this high plane and follow these 
exalted ideals, to supply the demand. Almost 
every great enterprise of any kind is constantly 
on the lookout for this type of character, and 
for the all-sufficient reason that great under- 
takings can be safely entrusted to no other. I 
have seen conspicuous ability and untiring 
energy fail utterly when not accompanied by 
that high moral character, that unbending integ- 
rity, characteristic of the good man as I have 
described him. All great enterprises and under- 



180 LETTERS TO THE FARM BOY 

takings depend for their success on the faith or 
confidence of the public in the men who control 
them. Unless these men have the traits of char- 
acter that will win and retain confidence, failure, 
in time, is inevitable. There is nothing, there- 
fore, in the end, that pays such high dividends, 
even in this life, as that old-fashioned righteous- 
ness, or uprightness, which is the peculiar char- 
acteristic of the good man. 

I desire, above all things else, that you be a 
good man. The good man is of the seed royal 
of the universe, the golden harvest, the ripened 
fruitage of creation. For him the deep foun- 
dations of the world were laid. For him the 
ages have been preparing. For his redemption 
" the Word was made flesh and dwelt among 
us," and the cross erected on Calvary. For his 
perfection is all the work, the toil, the pain, and 
suffering among men, and when, chastened by 
experience, and ripened by the wisdom which 
years only can give, he enters the house pre- 
pared for him, and for which he has been pre- 
pared, its doors will swing open of their own 
accord, and he will be welcomed by all that is 
good, beautiful, and true in the universe of God. 



THE OLD SANTA FE TRAIL 

By Col. HENRY INMAN, 

Late of the U?iited States Army 
With Illustrations by FREDERIC REMINGTON 

Cloth. Medium 8vo. $3.50 

With a Map of the Trail and Portraits 
" The author is Col. Henry Inman, a man whose experience in the 
region traversed by the route abundantly fitted him for the task. It is safe 
to say that every one who reads will find it one of the most interesting and, 
in one respect, one of the most remarkable books that ever came from the 
pen of an American army officer." — The Sicn, New York. 



THE GREAT SALT LAKE TRAIL 

By Col. HENRY INMAN 

and Hon. WILLIAM F. CODY (Buffalo Bill) 

Cloth. Medium 8vo. $3.50 

With Full-page Plates and many Drawings in the Text 
Like the " Old Santa Fe Trail," Colonel Inman's book is a complete 
arsenal of stories relating to the Great Salt Lake Trail. He carries the 
reader from the earliest pioneering expedition down to the opening of the 
transcontinental railroad. 

It makes a direct appeal to the love of story-telling that is rooted deep 
in our nature, and it gains much from the fact that many of the men who 
move in its pages still live and that their deeds are part of the history of our 
country. 

THE RANCHE ON THE OXHIDE 

A STORY OF BOYS' AND GIRLS' LIFE ON THE FRONTIER 

By Col. HENRY INMAN 

Late Capt. U. S. Army, Brevet Lieut. Col. Author of "The Old 
Santa Fe Trail" 

With Six Full=page Illustrations. Cloth. i2mo. $1.50 

In this book Colonel Henry Inman has told the story of the life of a 
family of two boys and two girls on a ranche in the far West before the rail- 
way stretched into Kansas. In those days even - settler was likely at any 
time to receive a sudden visit from an Indian tribe ; to meet a mountain lion as 
a fellow huntsman on the trail of a deer, or to clamber into the lair of a wolf 
when hunting small game. The spirit of the early days of the far West per- 
vades the story. It is full of the fresh air and the freedom and wholesome- 
ness of boyhood and girlhood spent on the prairie. Colonel W. F. Cody 
(Buffalo Bill) and General Custer are characters in the story. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, HEW YORK 



BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE 

By HAMLIN GARLAND 
Cloth. i2tno. $1.50 



Illustrated by E. W. DEMING 

" The breath of the western prairie blows refreshingly through Hamlin 
Garland's new story. It tells of the life of a boy on the farm from seed- 
time to harvest, of his work and his play, his school, of the county fair, of 
herding cattle, Fourth of July celebrations, of circuses and hired men." — 
Advance* 

" Written with the accuracy of knowledge and the insight of affection 
which come only with first-hand acquaintance. No one has better described 
life on a great farm ... it brings very graphically before the reader the 
movement of a life distinctly American and now fast receding into the past." 

— Outlook. 



NEW AND UNIFORM EDITION OF THE EARLIER 
WORKS OF HAMLIN GARLAND 

MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS 

A New Edition, with Additional Stories. i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 
" A wonderfully impressive and instructive book. Not merely from a 
literary point of view is it most praiseworthy, but certainly the East is 
in debt of gratitude to Mr. Garland for the enlightenment he gives upon 
the condition of things in the West." — Boston Courier. 

PRAIRIE FOLKS 

A New Edition Revised and Enlarged. i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 
" A volume of short stories of life on the prairie lands of the middle 
West . . . well worth reading and possessing," — Buffalo Express. 

ROSE OF BUTCHERS COOLLY 

i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 

" A strong and original book, a book which goes far toward being 
ranked among the very best American novels." 

— The Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia, 

THE TRAIL OF THE GOLD SEEKERS 

A record of travel in prose and verse. Cloth. $1.50 
"A work of real and vivid power." — The Dial. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



